Yesterday, Google announced “SideWiki” a new feature of the Firefox and IE browsers (Chrome to come soon) that allows anyone to contribute comments about any webpage –including this one. The impacts are far reaching, now every web page on the internet is social and can have consumer opinion –both positive and negative.
Control Over the Corporate Website Is Shifting To The Customers:
- Customers trust each other more than you –now they can assert their voices “on” your webpage. 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.
- Yet, don’t expect everyone to participate –or contribute valuable content. While social technology adoption is on the rise, not everyone writes, rates, and contributes content in every location, likely those who have experienced the product, influential, or competitors will be involved. Secondly, content created in this sidebar may be generally useless. To be successful, Google will need it to look more like Wikipedia than YouTube comments
- Expect Google to integrate this feature with existing systems. Google recently launched profiles, a feature that is the foundation for extending their social reach. With large social networks like Gmail already in place (That’s right, email is a social network) they can eventually sort content on SideWiki by context of friends, experts, or other sources. Google’s strategy is to ‘envelope’ the web this is typical of their approach.
- Although early, expect other social networks to launch competing features. Facebook has already created an ‘inlay’ so you can view links shared in the Facebook newspage in the context of your friends –expect them to grow this feature out shortly.
Recommendations for the Web Strategist: Develop a Social Strategy Now
- Shift your thinking: recognize that you don’t own your corporate website –your customers do. Accept the mindshift that your job is to not only serve up product and corporate content but to also be a platform and enabler for customers to discuss, share, and make suggestions to how you should improve what you offer.
- Develop a social strategy with dedicated resources. With every webpage now potentially social, you’ll need to develop a process, roles, and policy to ensure you’re monitoring the conversation, participating as you would in blog discussions, and influencing the discussion. 80% of success is developing an internal strategy, providing education before a free-for-all happens with customers and employees.
- Don’t be reactive to negative content –embrace social content now. Give users the ability to leave social feedback directly on your corporate webpages, or aggregate existing social content. CMS vendors are developing features to enable this, as well as community platform vendors like Kickapps, Pluck, Liveworld’s Livebar offer rapid deployment options.
I predicted Google would be one of the first to do this, however I expected them to start with Chrome, not FF and IE. Expect this to be a default feature of Chrome –not just a plugin in future efforts.
Update: Just saw an interesting tweet from @prem_k about impacts to CRM. He’s Right. CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Rightnow and others) will need to aggregate content in Google’s Sidewiki. It’s not just CRM, Brand Monitoring companies (Radian6, Buzzmetrics, Cymfony, Visible Technologies) will also need to “suck in” that data.
Update 2, a few hours later: We should stop to think about how competitors could display ads “on” your corporate site and you couldn’t stop it, why? Take a look at Google’s business model, they envelop and categorize the web, then display ads on it. There’s nothing stopping them from allowing advertisers to put ads on SideWiki as “sponsored” information. For example, Coke could run their latest ads on the Pepsi.com SikeWiki area. HP could run ads on the Dell.com site. This *already* happens in the search engine result pages on Google.com why not in sidewiki?
Update 3, the next day: I just tried out SideWiki to see how it works. I came to this very post and found out that there are already three comments. I left a comment welcoming folks, and it gave me the option to Tweet it, which I did. Here’s what sidewiki looks like, you don’t never have to have the plugin for this to work. Which means that this certainly has lower barriers to adoption. A few other field notes? I no longer have to fuss with captacha on blogs or name/email/url once I’m logged in to SideWiki, I can comment around the web. Secondly, it centralizes all my comments on my Google profile tool. You do see what Google is doing right? They are turning the whole web into a social network.
http://dotspots.com/#dots/all does the same
I think this is a fantastic concept in principle but I can sympathise with site owners who will no doubt feel very concerned about the perceived loss of control over ‘their’ website. Yes, people can freely talk about your website/product/service on bookmarking and networking sites (or in person for that matter) but someone looking to buy widgets may not actually find your website via Digg or Twitter. Comments left on sidewiki will be highly visible without requiring any significant level of viral support. Do the associated risks make this a step too soon for brands who are unable (or not sufficiently aware) to resource a social strategy?
I really have to say that this whole thing really concerns me. It hijacks the content, overshadows the concept of a site, competes with sites’ existing commenting, and disrupts the experience of a site like someone who can’t shut up in a movie theater. Not everything is intended to have a peanut gallery attached. People are always free to discuss a site in their own webspace, but this is imposing into someone else’s inherent experience and on a scale that google obviously cannot control. i think that we will see every site so littered with spam and offensive or immature remarks that everyone will have to get the stupid toolbar installed just to police their own site– and still have to ASK google to remove things. Not every website is some corporation trying to sell something, so this isn’t about empowering a consumer. This is about google empowering google. I realize that it is not a new idea, but the scale and integration involved are seemingly irresponsible and careless on google’s part.
I was hoping ShiftSpace.Org would become the norm for web annotation, but at least this way google can introduce the idea to the main stream and people who want to augment without googles controll can move to the liberal open source option. I feel we are heading toward a world we can annotate the entire web and eventually our entire reality. This is what we all do in our own heads anyway, currently we are developing and learning new ways to express it. I just hope the platforms adopted by the public demand the freedom to be able to express their full freedom of opinion and speech. Cheers.
this space is a game changer in my view.. interesting how dotspots and sidewiki came out around the same time.
For reasons obvious to any Corporate Website Manager, this is definitely a development in the wrong direction. There has to be a way one needs to be control of the content they have created. This could also have negative repercussions on a Company’s Brand Image if someone (eg: disgruntled employees)decide to go on offensive. I think Google must find a way to counter these issues otherwise Corporates will be forced to use massive resources to counteract negative actions.
I think this is fantastic – someone had to do it without iframes.
There are some slightly delusional comments on this topic (here and especially elsewhere). Anyone who wishes to have absolute control over content displayed on a visitor’s screen should stick to television. The internet is valuable as a communications medium precisely because it is bi-directional.
If this takes off, it’s because people find this added layer of communication to be valuable. That, in and of itself, is reason enough for brands/sites/communities to embrace it, or similar technology.
Sidewiki does creep me out a bit from a privacy perspective. Though I suppose anyone who has the Google Toolbar installed (or, for that matter, has any URL suggestions service turned on in their browser) has already chosen to share their browsing behavior.
Jeremiah,
1) I disagree. Control is not a myth. I don't particularly care what the heck people are saying elsewhere, unless it is slanderous. However, it's outrageous that I could be spammed and slandered on my own website, not to mention that advertisements could be placed there as well! C'mon, Google has crossed the line big time. I built the site. I pay for the hosting and the domain. I should be able to control what appears there.
2) Congratulations to the NYT!
Google is now Big Brother, yet many of you here seem not to care? You are so tied into the social web that you wear blinders. You seem to think there should be no privacy, and no right to website control.
Jeremiah,
1) I disagree. Control is not a myth. I don't particularly care what the heck people are saying elsewhere, unless it is slanderous. However, it's outrageous that I could be spammed and slandered on my own website, not to mention that advertisements could be placed there as well! C'mon, Google has crossed the line big time. I built the site. I pay for the hosting and the domain. I should be able to control what appears there.
2) Congratulations to the NYT!
Google is now Big Brother, yet many of you here seem not to care? You are so tied into the social web that you wear blinders. You seem to think there should be no privacy, and no right to website control.
Jeremiah,
1) I disagree. Control is not a myth. I don't particularly care what the heck people are saying elsewhere, unless it is slanderous. However, it's outrageous that I could be spammed and slandered on my own website, not to mention that advertisements could be placed there as well! C'mon, Google has crossed the line big time. I built the site. I pay for the hosting and the domain. I should be able to control what appears there.
2) Congratulations to the NYT!
Google is now Big Brother, yet many of you here seem not to care? You are so tied into the social web that you wear blinders. You seem to think there should be no privacy, and no right to website control.
Jeremiah,
1) I disagree. Control is not a myth. I don't particularly care what the heck people are saying elsewhere, unless it is slanderous. However, it's outrageous that I could be spammed and slandered on my own website, not to mention that advertisements could be placed there as well! C'mon, Google has crossed the line big time. I built the site. I pay for the hosting and the domain. I should be able to control what appears there.
2) Congratulations to the NYT!
Google is now Big Brother, yet many of you here seem not to care? You are so tied into the social web that you wear blinders. You seem to think there should be no privacy, and no right to website control.
I personally don't like the idea. Now a days, there are so many people out there that will post things/lies just to make your website look bad. Don't these people have anything better to do, then to cause havoc for other people that want to succeed?
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