Should You Listen to Seth Godin and Claim Your Brand in Public?

Seth Godin just launched a new service Brands in Public build on his previous content creating company Squidoo, in partnership with BzzAgent. It aggregates conversations about a given brand that take place on blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and elsewhere. Brands can pay $400 a month to moderate their own pages. [Update: TechCrunch reported on Seth Godin's reversal where he will only create Brands in Public pages for brands upon request, so it's now fully opt-in. That makes this far less urgent for brands to consider.] You can read much more about this in Ad Age.

Should you subscribe to Brands in Public? Here are three questions to ask when considering whether to claim your brand page:

Do you have the resources to manage it? I note in the Ad Age article, “…The $400 fee is just a start. The bigger cost is the manpower involved in maintaining the pages, which is true of any social-media campaign.”
Will anyone notice it? Try searching for the page. Look at any keywords that pop out on the page, try to conduct some specific long tail searches, and see what it takes for it to come up in search results. If you can’t find the page, odds are your consumers can’t either, but make a note to repeat the exercise once a month or so. If the page comes up prominently, you may want to do something about it.
How will it fit in with your social media architecture? Odds are you won’t get to do enough with the page, from a branding or a content standpoint, to make it a hub for your digital presence. Should it even be a spoke though? Would you want to direct consumers there? Does it provide value for your target audience, whether current customers or prospects?

At the very least, there’s one thing you should do: monitor the page. If you’re not monitoring these sources already, this is a good way to get started. If you are monitoring these sources individually, this may be an easier interface than how you’re currently doing it. The question is whether to curate and moderate these conversations, and if you should do it here.