Google’s newest product – The Sidewiki, has arrived.
Your site now has comments activated on every page, all the time, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
You can’t moderate it.
You can’t ban people.
You can’t delete false claims left by others.
Google’s official announcement came on Wednesday. They do have some of their own guidelines for usage, which may or may not jive with yours.
Have you written a story about the high school principal? Now every student at that school can comment on it, and you’ve lost control.
So what now?
If you were not familiar with the term “Reputation Management” before, you will need to become familiar with it.
You (as the site owner) get one special treat. You get to always post a comment at the very top of the Sidewiki.
How does Google know if you’re the site owner? Because you have a Google profile and use Google Webmaster Tools, and have verified your site through the GWT. What’s that you say, you don’t use Google, you have a strategic alliance with Yahoo? Too bad, you MUST verify through Google.
Do you have a crummy Google profile, you better fix it up, because it’s your new face to everyone else using Sidewiki.
Want to see what lies in your future? Install Sidewiki/Google Toolbar and visit Seth Godin’s latest idea, that has been met with some resistance.
Seth’s blog never allowed comments, but now, there’s nothing he can do, and you can Facebook or Tweet people directly to your specific comment, using built in functionality.
Using Sidewiki:
To write an annotation, you have to first sign in with your Google account and then click the “Write an entry” link at the bottom of the sidebar. Each annotation consists of a block of text and an optional title. When the user finishes filling out the form, they click the “Publish” button to post the annotation. It’s also possible to associate an annotation with an individual snippet of text selected on the page. Google says that annotations that are tied to text will appear on all pages that share the original content.
Did you see that last line? Re-read it and fully digest it’s meaning.
So how are the comments displayed? Here’s what Google says:
We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which [entries] should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed.
Impact:
As long as this service is tied to the Google Toolbar (and for now, only the experimental Google Toolbar) it’s impact may be small. When Google rolls it out to it’s normal toolbar, it will grow some more. When Google rolls it out to it’s Chrome browser, it will grow again. By that point, you really need to have a strategy in place.
Strategy:
If I ran a newspaper site, I would enlist a handful of people to jump through all the hoops and get up and running on Google Sidewiki. I would then encourage them to use it. Become trusted power users, especially on my site. That way, when disaster hits, I know they could come in and claim the top of the Sidewiki comments.
This is also another opportunity to connect with the community and reach out to the daily readers and ask for feedback, and perhaps even help.
Google says that annotations that are tied to text will appear on all pages that share the original content.
Hmmm…sneaky move, Google. Thanks for being on the frontier, Phil. It’s interesting that Google is going to rank comments with an algorithm rather than by time of post. It’s a good strategy to start now to become a power user to ensure good positioning come crisis time. I guess I should comment from Sidewiki next time so I can dominate the 1918 comments!
I like google. But the negative aspects of this technology as overwhelming.
Imagine I sell widgets and I have a rich website with 100’s and 1000’s of pages. Imagine if my competitors meticulously go through all of my pages (as they do already) and deliberately add negative and or inflammatory comments on each of my (1000’s of) pages, with no way of me moderating the comments (which will be tens of 1000’s)
There needs to be a way for this feature to be disabled, in a similar to robots.txt.
This technology is just too reckless to allow to even breathe, let alone have a life.
cmroanirgo, here’s the big secret (in my opinion) – only a very small minority use the Google toolbar.
Will there be abuse? Of course.
Will it be your competitors? Probably not, because it’s not anonymous. So in order to be a “power user” and show up at the top of the comments, you’ll need a stable user profile. So that means that for normal business people, it’s not worth the effort of trying to undermine your competitors site via Sidewiki.
And don’t forget, you can always call them out as the site owner.
I’m not buying the whole “It will ruin me” argument.
Phil…
Nice theory but not realistic. Google Toolbar may have a small(ish) (relative) number of users right now, but Google’s stated intention is to rule the universe. More and more people will start using these things.
In any case, you apparently haven’t been paying much attention to the map spam/local reviews issue. Locksmiths, florists, etc., getting raped non-stop by unlicensed, out of state scammers. These people spend all their time, USING GOOGLE E-MAILS, writing reviews for all of their businesses (Yes, they DO take the time), carefully NOT writing reviews for their own business linked to the e-mail, but for the dozens if not hundreds of others. Some of these folks have thousands of reviews under their well established Google e-mail names. Power users under ANY definition of the word.
These are the same folks who will be spamming the living daylights out of local businesses in the same manner. I personally know a dozen locksmiths in my state alone that have gone under due to these tactics.
So your quote of “I’m not buying the whole “It will ruin me” argument.” is specious at best.
Thanks for your time… Back to spending 70% of my time better spent with customers instead fighting off the spamming predators making serious inroads to destroying my 20 year, well earned reputation.
Side-Wiki will be a nightmare.
Sincerely,
kim
I’m not sure where Google has posted their intention to rule the universe, maybe I just missed it 😉
I agree that spammers will use these tools, just like the use every other part of the internet. Statistics show that roughly 90% of email is spam, but it hasn’t stopped normal people from using it with a pretty high level of trust. I think if Sidewiki ever gets a decent adoption rate, it will be similar.
The other part of the equation for Sidewiki is the fact that it may have showed up too late to the party. Since so many places now allow interaction other ways.