The tool that will twist your balls

Over the last couple of weeks Google released two products. One was called Wave. It was to much fanfare despite only being made available initially to the 100,000 who received an invite and anyone who was forwarded an invite from another recipient. I am not sure exactly what it does or how it works, something or other to do with making e-mail live. E-mail 2.0? I look forward to sampling it.

But what they also released with much less fuss is perhaps in the high-tech world no where near as cool, but has the ability to punch well above it’s weight. I am talking about a little tool called Sidewiki.

What is Sidewiki? Some sort of vertical tumour?

Well it maybe for brands and I will get to the reason why soon.

For those who have not seen it, Sidewiki is a downloadable, free (as with everything Google) widget. It sits nicely on your toolbar in Internet Explorer or Firefox (curiously it is not yet available on Google’s own web browser, Chrome) and has a little button on the left side of your browser window.

What does it do?

No matter what web page you visit, you can click on this little button and a side bar opens up that is unique to the web page that you are visiting. In this bar anyone can leave notes, thoughts, feedback etc, respond to others and vote up and down others comments. Go to another page and there will be a different set of peoples comments. Neat little trick huh?

There is nothing actually amazing about this, in fact despite not being a techie, I would have thought that this was not the most difficult thing to build either. At least when compared to other tools that Google have developed.

So why is this going to change the world and have such a big impact on brands?

Do a search on your least favourite (or favourite brand) with the word “hate”, “sucks”, “load of crap” etc and you will probably find someone, somewhere on the web has been discussing this brand. Take a big brand with a bad reputation (try a telco) and you will get a lot of hits. One particular telco I tried this on had over a million hits. I then repeated the exercise with positive adjectives i.e. “ love XXX brand” and had a million hits about how much people loved to hate the brand!

So if all this info is already out there, why is Sidewiki going to change the game? OK, I am not sure if it will change the game, but it is going to have a significant impact. Us humans are a lazy bunch (at least the majority of us Westernised humans are) and so when we have a positive or negative experience we have had to go out there (or in there, being the web) and find the most appropriate site to vent our frustrations. Think about a brand that you would like to moan about, do a search and then start to think about all the decisions that you have to make to decide what is the most appropriate platform to make your point. “Does it have a large enough following so my message gains amplification?”… “Are the others on the site going to empathise and rally behind me?”… you get the picture.

The other big issue is that brands may not find your complaint – ultimately you are probably complaining for one of three reasons.

1. You want the Brand to bend down, kiss your feet and repent
2. You want to rant
3. You are after a job with a tabloid or low grade TV station's current affairs program
   

If it is either reason two or three, well brands are probably not going to be overly interested. There are some great tools out there for brands to get a feel for what sentiment is about their brand (Buzzmetrics, Radian 6 etc) but the game changes when people’s perceptions are literally attached to your web pages.

Brands are going to become very much more aware of what people are saying and those that have been ignoring the conversations are going to feel their balls being twisted even tighter (for want of a more appropriate analogy). And other customers, or potential customers, are going to have even easier access to relevant information about that brand simply by going to their web address.

So what should brands do? Simple – start talking with their customers in an open and honest way and put them at the centre of their decision making.