Squidoo Lenses for B2B Marketers?
I’ve set up a “lens” called “C4ISR Marketing – aka Network Centric Marketing” on Squidoo and am trying to teach myself about whether it provides utility for B2B marketers. My “lens” (this is what you call your site there) is not a high ranking site in the Squidoo world by any means, but I guess it’s better than a lot of others. For now I’ll tinker with it and learn.
Squidoo is the brain child of Seth Godin and was built by Viget Labs. I think it’s a great concept and there is much more education to obtain on my part to leverage more value out of it.Here’s my question: It seems perfect for hobbyists, enthusiasts, consultants and the like, but can/should companies set up lenses like they set up MySpace pages and expect traffic either to that site or from that site for gathering data?
As of today, there seem to be relatively few lenses on with corporations as the main topic, although some consumer products (iPods, Coca-Cola) are topics that people seem to want to toot their horn about. Most lenses appear to have been set up by individuals. Does it seem inevitable that someone will claim to be an “expert” on a particular organization – someone who knows how to do business with them and other things that people may need to know? Should a Gartner Group or Morgan Stanley analyst manage a Squidoo lens to bring attention to companies they cover or verticals in which they have subject matter expertise?
Ironically, at this writing, there is no lens for “Viget Labs.” Who would be the subject matter expert on them – One of their Co-Founders, Brian Williams or Andy Rankin, CEO and President (respectively)? Their PR flack? Someone else?
What if someone with malicious intent is the “first to market” on Squidoo in claiming expertise on a particular company and does things on the lens that the company does not like or does not want anyone to know?
It seems to me that this is another growing territory to monitor, in a way like the blogosphere and Wikipedia, where organizations need to know what is being said about them and may need to do some pre-emptive messaging. It is possible to craft and post objective, truthful statements about your company and not earn the wrath of other users or censorship of Wikipedia, et. al. Maybe this is not the purpose of Squidoo, and maybe it needs to decide whether or not to allow a possible “commandeering” by organizational marketers. Perhaps I need more time to understand Squidoo, but I think there’s a bigger B2B opportunity and marketers need to be thinking about how to approach it also.
We shall see how this evolves…