Cup of Joe: The Danger Of Being Oz
Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the film classic The Wizard of Oz. One of my favorite parts of the movie is when Dorothy discovers the true identity of the Wizard. This scene is symbolic of many political and social truths in our society.
Coincidentally, we saw this same scene play out in the Internet marketing industry this week. On Wednesday, Seth Godin, launched Brands in Public. In short the program aggregates mentions of brands from different social media sites to a single page on Godin’s Squidoo. While Godin claims that he consulted many brand managers about this idea and they all supported it, there was a barrage of criticism from folks in the Internet marketing industry. Most of the criticism drew attention to the fact that Godin himself has been a champion of transparent marketing tactics such as “permission based marketing” however, this program seeks to leverage the hard work of other brand builders with out their permission.
It appeared on Wednesday that Godin’s curtain was pulled aside and his true identity revealed. As the scarecrow might say, “You humbug!” Despite all of his high ideals and transparent philosophies, Godin is looking more like a spammer than the international marketing guru we have learned to love. Perhaps, Seth Godin’s true genius isn’t in his books or his blog, but rather in his ability to market himself as a champion of transparency while simultaneously hiding his true agenda behind his own emerald curtain.
In all fairness, Friday, Godin released details about changes that the Brands in Public program will be taking. Now, they will only create a page for a brand if the company requests it, and the company will have joint control of the page. This seems to be in direct response to the surge of criticism on Wednesday. It’s a positive turn of events, but the question that I have now: Is Godin’s curtain now permanently open? Now that we have seen Godin behind the curtain will he begin being truly transparent?
The Biggest Danger of Personal Branding
The biggest danger of personal branding is not in failing, but succeeding. To have a successful, well known personal brand means that you are held at an extremely high level of scrutiny. Your supporters and brand enthusiast will have high expectations that you must reach.
Because of this you must be careful to always be sincere and engage in an honest dialog. If you can do this successfully then when your emerald curtain is pulled aside there won’t be any surprises!
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Yahoo: Pay No Attention to the 10 Year Search Deal: Look at What’s New on Delicious!
Not to be all Wizard-of-Oz on us, but Yahoo really doesn’t want us to pay attention to the man behind the curtain (Steve Ballmer). No, they want to focus us on their new SERP and their new Delicious search tools and fresh bookmarks.
Don’t you worry—don’t think for one moment that I, the paragon of journalistic integrity, could be distracted so easily from decrying Yahoo’s abdication of control over its search—ooh, shiny emailing and tweeting tools!
So Delicious does have some cool new stuff to show off—and maybe it’s not just a distraction ploy. Maybe it’s a ploy to remind us that Yahoo can still do cool new stuff. 
Anyway, Delicious has a new search tool to help its users find bookmarks (theirs and others’) more easily. Yahoo says “with advanced timeline and tag filtering controls so that you can search within a given date range or filter the results by tag. We’ve also enhanced the search results page to display rich content including YouTube videos with inline playback, Flickr images, and Yelp local data when applicable.”
Delicious has also added a feature to highlight new and popular bookmarks—but not on the Delicious site. The Fresh Bookmarks tab on the homepage features up-and-coming bookmarks (gee, no other social site has ever done that )—the bookmarks that are most popular on Twitter (as opposed to the most popular bookmarks on Delicious, which are under the Popular Bookmarks tab).
On this new feature yesterday, the Delicious blog quotes Wired, who touted the predecessor app, TweetNews, as possibly “the best mashup we’ve ever seen.” Hopefully the Delicious version gets the same positive reception.
Finally, Delicious also added more social features to the add bookmark page. You can add recipients in the Send field—and get the option to email or even tweet bookmarks.
Delicious looks to be doing a good job of adapting to the most popular social site with the media today, instead of decrying Twitter as a poor man’s competitor.
What do you think? Will these new features be enough to keep Delicious users happy—and relying on Delicious? Or does this just push more users toward Twitter?
