Google’s Sidewiki turns your brand into a forum

By Molly Flatt

Buzz about Google’s Sidewiki is spreading faster than an autumnal bout of swine flu, and it’s no wonder: the big G’s new plaything helps to turn the whole internet into social media. Sidewiki is basically a conversational sidebar: a browser add-on which allows any user to read others’ comments about any web page and then contribute their own.

As web strategist Jeremiah Owyang puts it so well, “Every webpage on your corporate website, intranet, and extranet are now social. Anyone who accesses these features can now rely on their friends or those who contribute to get additional information. Competitors can link to their competing product, consumers can rate or discuss the positive and negative experiences with your company or product“.

Yep, everything you write can now be publicly reinterpreted, recontextualised, challenged - and, of course, praised - on the very same screen.  Everywhere becomes a forum. This is a shocking concept for businesses. Their carefully controlled ”brand voice’ is now not even safe on their slick corporate site; it’s being overlaid with a cacophany of consumer voices instead.

However, companies shouldn’t be afraid. Sidewiki is the logical extension of our WOM-enabled world and one great positive is that it’s all about the content. It facilitates socialising around specifics -  specific passions, specific people, specific products, specific brands - thereby providing an ideal breeding ground for enthusiastic and informed consumer WOM. But it will be also interesting to see how Sidewiki contributors start to form a community amongst themselves. Will Sidewiki truly be a place of discovery, where I can find out what your gran thinks as easily as I can see the soapboxing of a social media guru, or will it condense into huddles of likeminded peers only paying attention to each other in an attempt to keep things relevant and exert some quality control?

Moreover, will brands use the tool to deepen and diversify their content and listen to their consumers - or will they scramble to control the commentary and reassert their own monologue?

Talk to us if you want help doing the first bit.

Brought into the world on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 and filed under Uncategorized.

  • There is no way to control the commentary. This is the problem. I can write on your comments area in your blog which you must approve, or I can write directly into sidewiki which you do not edit - Google controls. You can only edit your own comments.

    If I leave comments on sidewiki, you get no benefit to your site as a webmaster. And what happens when your neighbor doesn't like you anymore and decides to put pictures and video up of you on the sidewiki on your site and spread lies about you? Everyone in the public will not only see it, but it can get picked up in the search engines and because it is on your site it now looks more "true" than if it had been posted on a miscelaneous forum.

    Sidewiki must die. This was released in a horrible fashion. I would prefer an opt out option. Google is infringing on my website, content, etc which I pay for by the way by paying my own hosting. I dont' need G covering nearly a third of my screen. Visitors should be there to enjoy a site, not to carry on a conversation about what ever they want. There are online forums for this. There are other places for this.

    I will install the sidewiki blockers until the cows come home.
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