Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
outspokenmedia.com
Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
#2Like GetSatisfaction, stripped to its essentials this is "I have an authority domain and can rank for your brand name. Such a wonderful brand, would hate to see anything happen to it. $5,000 a year is cheap to you, isn't it?"
Re: Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
#3When you think about it, its rather surprising that this has not already happened in a big way...
Re: Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
#4In case this business model actually works soon enough you get dozens of websites wanting you to pay them for your brand.
Re: Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
#5Honestly if you really want to create a good brand, create a useful product and be an honest company. Seth is wrong; you can control what people say about you. But you can't hack it with a system like this. And if your not a sleazy corporation producing bad product, you certainly don't need something like Public Brand.
Re: Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
#6Wow, I so don't see the point of Brands In Public. Is it for companies who don't have their own web site? Because otherwise, why would you want to reply on some third party web site, rather than on your own?
Re: Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
#7Like GetSatisfaction, stripped to its essentials this is "I have an authority domain and can rank for your brand name. Such a wonderful brand, would hate to see anything happen to it. $5,000 a year is cheap to you, isn't it?"
I'm not sure I understand the legalities of this. What is to stop a company listed on there from suing for trademark infringement?
Re: Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
#8Like GetSatisfaction, stripped to its essentials this is "I have an authority domain and can rank for your brand name. Such a wonderful brand, would hate to see anything happen to it. $5,000 a year is cheap to you, isn't it?"
I'm not sure I understand the legalities of this. What is to stop a company listed on there from suing for trademark infringement?
If they're smart, the fact that precisely nothing would make Seth's day more than being sued by a large corporation trying to stamp down on the little guy trying to expose their horrible business practices.
Seth can't get his new business venture onto the front page of the NYT by himself, after all -- he needs your legal department to make that happen. The rest of the Fortune 500 will promptly DDOS his order takers with their credit card numbers when that gets published. He'll also collect tens of thousands of links, many of them from authority sites such as TechCrunch, Slashdot, Consumerist, the newspapers which take direction from the NYT, etc etc, and as a result rank much better for other brands than he had previously.
If they're stupid, hopefully they're not so stupid that they'll ignore the lawyers who will say there is not even a scintilla of a case.
[Edit: Its not letting me respond because the site is worried I'm flaming you, which is totally not my intent.
In sum, litigation is a last-resort dispute resolution mechanism which you use to achieve business goals. Litigation here will not achieve business goals. On a totally separate level, which is academically interesting but only that, BigCo would be unlikely to prevail with a claim of trademark infringement.
There is no danger of confusion between Ford and Ford In Public -- it says "unofficial", prominently. There is no cognizable commercial damage -- Seth is not trying to sell cars. If you were a particularly bad trademark lawyer, you might argue that someone saying bad things about your brand causes you damage, but that cuts against a finding of trademark infringement, because it tends to demonstrate that the mark is being used, take your pick, transformatively, for identification ("nominative use"), and for purposes of commentary.
But, again, first rule of law for programmers: law is not program code, and litigation is not executing an algorithm. It is a negotiating tactic.]
Re: Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
#9Douche bag move.
Re: Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
#10Meh. Get off your high horse. Squidoo is even stressing the fact that it's unofficial to the point where it's annoying. OK, so the author thinks it's useless, that's a valid opinion, but that doesn't make it unethical.
It's a website that mentions other brands. So does Yelp and any other local search service. Business and Finance Websites. Not to mention all the [brand]sucks.com websites.
http://www.squidoo.com/kfc-in-public isn't anymore brand-jacking of KFC than http://outspokenmedia.com/reputation-management/seth-godin-b... is brandjacking of Seth Godin.