Recently @paulray pointed out the latest and greatest from Squidoo - 'brand lenses'.
It's a great aggregator as it pulls together all the latest and greatest (and the not so great!) content about the brand from across the social networks and sticks it all in one place (called a brand lense) using a pretty nice sort of layout - much better than many RSS tools. If Google is indexing these brand lenses, as a short cut to pulling the deluge of social content, there is no reason why these should not be added to the list of tools.
So far so good then...? Yes if your building a brand lense from scratch but many brands won't get this chance.
The latest move by Squidoo has aptly been called Brands in Public. Essentially Squidoo have created (and continue to do so) Brand Lenses for the likes of The Home Depot, Mini Cooper, etc and then publish them which interesting but it's what they do next that is the really interesting bit.
They then tell the brand they can take control of this 'lense' for $400 per month and they can then 'curate' (ie. own) the lense and decide what is shown and not shown component-wise and therefore content-wise.
So if the brand doesn't pay and take control then it remains unofficial, unmoderated and (dare I say it!) true. Scare tactics?
But for $400 per month which brand wouldn't take 'control' because control is good yes? Maybe in some peoples eyes.
Zappos and Virgin have taken their Lense already and I am sure many will follow.
Be quick, grab your brand lense now or else...
