Tis the season to let other people deal with peace on earth and goodwill towards man. I’ll stick to what interests me: conflicts & sarcasm. Counting down the top SEO smackdowns of 2009:

#5. Barone v Godin: Brandjacking?

The provocation:

Lisa Barone v Seth Godin

“Squidoo has built several hundred pages, each one about a major brand. More are on the way. We’ll keep going until we have thousands of important brands, each on its own page … If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month.” — Seth Godin, Launching Brands in Public

The reply:

Many came out against Godin’s initiative, none more powerfully than Lisa Barone:

“[Seth] has sent his team of goblins out to register your Brands in Public company page for you, fill it with scraped content (blog posts, tweets, Google News, Trends, etc) and then lock it down so that you have absolutely no way to touch or control it. Unless you pay him.

Four hundred dollars. A month.

Wow. I’d personally like to welcome Seth Godin to the world of brandjacking and hostage taking. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

– Lisa Barone, Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking

I’m including this as an SEO smackdown because that might have been the key issue here. People Googling your brand name were often going to find the pages that Godin put together. Godin was going to show these Googlers all the nasty things being said about you on the internet — unless you gave him $400 a month.

This whole thing would likely have received very different coverage had there been a clear and friendly free opt-out from the beginning.

The final irony was that Godin has arguably been the leading proponent of interacting with your tribe, and his sales pitch for this product included:

“You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff.”

And yet in some critical ways the man who talks that talk better than anyone doesn’t walk the walk. Had Godin allowed comments on his own blog he’d  have had a fighting chance of influencing the conversation the conversation that followed. Or if he used Twitter the way everybody else does, for a 2-way conversation engaging his tribe. But Seth uses blogs and Twitter to broadcast, not to interact. The conversation took place on Lisa Barone’s blog, where she and her tribe — which includes key members of the SEO industry — crushed him.

More of my thoughts on this issue here: The Barone – Godin Smackdown: Is the Torch Being Passed?

Next: #4 Arrington vs Demand Media

Passing the Torch

I enjoy reading Seth Godin and Lisa Barone so I found their recent smackdown compelling.

For anybody who missed it:

1. Godin launched Brands in Public where he puts up a page for each brand highlighting what’s being said about them on the web. To gain control of your company’s page you can pay Godin $400 / month. There’s also a hard-to-find opt-out to get the page removed (free) [this opt-out may not have been there during the launch -- it certainly wasn't prominent or publicized].
2. Barone took her acerbic wit and condemned Godin for Brandjacking. Her strongest accusation IMO was that since Godin’s pages would rank well companies would be forced to pay up to protect their brands.
3. Most of the leading lights of the SEO community, including Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts (the head of the Google Anti-Spam Team) sided strongly with Lisa.
4. Godin finally followed the only course open to him … figuring out how to spin his surrender.

This has been covered to death, but 2 quick points that I haven’t seen:

• Barone and Godin both present themselves as Branding Gurus, and in the branding sphere, Godin is a legend. But ultimately this battle was fought in the SEO space where Barone far outshines Godin in both knowledge and relationships. Godin keynotes business of software conferences, but Barone is part of the inner circle of the SEO gods.
• Barone accused Godin of abusing the power vested in him by search engines to get high rankings for his sites’ pages. Once the head of Google’s anti-spam unit endorsed Lisa’s position, Godin had no choice but to back down.

The irony of the last point is too strong for me not to mention, even though it’s already been covered.

Godin pitched his product as “a place where searchers will find the conversation as it stands right now, along with you and your brands response.” And yet by not allowing comments on his blog, he lost any chance to influence the conversation. Unfortunately for Godin, Google launched SideWiki the same day, allowing people to have a conversation on Godin’s blog anyway, just in a way that Godin couldn’t influence (I bet Godin wished Google would have taken $400 / month to let him control that conversation). Barone on the other hand allows comments on her blog, and has 161 comments on this post (so far), and used the control to answer almost every commenter. Added benefit for Barone: she gets the SEO value of her site’s comments. Godin just watches from the sidelines as his rejection of UGC (in the form of comments) on his site just forced the conversation off his home turf.

I know it’s easy to get carried away from a single episode, but this gave the feeling that the torch was being passed to the new champion and the new generation, the one that came of age after the dawn of SEO and Social Media.

Godin is a legend. He sold his first social company to Yahoo! for $30 million back in 1998. He’s written best sellers. People I’ve worked with speak of him as the god of marketing / branding. Joel Spolsky wrote of him “If you’ve ever heard Seth speak, you’ve had your mind blown. Which is why, on the rare occasion, when he runs a one-day seminar, he charges $1650 to attend, and it sells out in seconds.”

He’ll remain interesting and relevant for a long time. And yet … as Spolsky has said, we’re living in a world where some websites (like Spolsky’s Stack Overflow) have to consider Google to be their home page. And suddenly you have to ask yourself whether or not Barone is better positioned in this brave new world. Interestingly, @thisissethsblog has over 10,000 followers, about 4,000 more than @LisaBarone. But Godin isn’t following anybody. His Twitter account is just a one-way broadcast of his latest blog posts. Barone seems to live the Godin ideal far better than he does. She engages her community, and lives in the inner-circle of the SEO Twitterverse.

I’m too old to refer to Godin as “so 1998″ and I’m sure the man has plenty of good decades left. But this smackdown was the new generation stepping further onto the stage. And I think this generation makes the branding world a lot more interesting.

This site’s loyal readers (both of you) probably noticed by now that I can be negative sometimes. Actually, you don’t know the half of it, this site is my positive side.

Go Grumpy!

Anyway, Seth Godin just tricked me (again) with a post titled The Problem with Positive Thinking. Spoiler alert: His “problem” with it was that it’s hard. Which is sort of like saying your biggest weakness is that you’re too damn wonderful.

I used to condemn the curmudgeons and naysayers and worship at the altar of Tom Peters and the rest of the “Ready, Fire, Aim” crowd.

And there are a few professional boosters of Boosterism like Godin that make a good living out of enthusiastically championing enthusiasm. And there are a few people who’ve succeeded with that Mickey Mouse attitude. And there’s certainly a large place in the world for positive thinking and enthusiasm.

But I’ve moved to the dark side. Too many decisions, in business, personal lives, and politics get made by reasoning that should be left for sitcoms and science fiction. “Will it work? It has to captain. It’s our only hope.” Score that a 10 for dramatic effect, 0 (or negative ten, actually) for real world usefulness. Our company’s greatest successes came when we learned to think negatively about most of the “great opportunities” that came our way and instead focused on disciplined blocking and tackling. I guess everybody chooses their favorite bogeyman on which to blame the financial crisis. I would argue that a little less positive thinking would have been a good thing in the financial sector.

Yes, being positive certainly has its time and place. But positive thinkers — perhaps you should think more generously and charitably of us curmudgeons.

First let me admit that I didn’t consider myself a fan of Seth Godin. Maybe not his fault, but I was just annoyed by a bunch of Godin groupies that I felt over-simplified his ideas. Maybe it was all in my mind, but I felt I kept hearing Godin groupies telling me to think outside of the box and come up with sexy new ideas. But I had just stumbled into the box that would bring us success if we could just properly focus and execute on the incremental improvements that our users were begging for.

But I digress. I absolutely love Seth Godin’s blog. I get these nice little insights in my e-mail everyday.

Today Seth’s The Best Way to Make an Internal Sale focused on a technique Google uses — videotaped interviews with users (or potential users). Godin focuses on using these videos to convince those around you. My problem isn’t really convincing others, I get the support I need. I’m the one who needs to see these videos to help me understand our users.

In this video, Google discovers that people don’t know what a browser is. When you spend all day with people who can tell you what percentage of the market Opera and Safari have, watching this video is an excellent wake up call. We in product management have to continually remind ourselves that most of our users have devoted their lives to other quests. I spend about 2 1/2 hours a day driving, but I know nothing about what’s under the hood. I like food, but I know little about cooking and nutrition. Our users spend lots of time on the web, but they don’t live and breathe it the way we do, and we have to design our products with that in mind.

If you’re a geek, watch the video and see if it scares you as much as it scared me.

I’ve really been enjoying Seth Godin’s blog. But boy did he cheat in his post Malcolm is Wrong.

“I’ve never written those three words before, but he’s never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go.”

Cute beginning for a post.

“Free is the name of Chris’s new book, and it’s going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about.”

So far, so good. But then:

“The first argument that makes no sense is, ‘should we want free to be the future?’

Who cares if we want it? It is.

The second argument that makes no sense is, “how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?”

Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.”

Which is great writing, and great points. Really strikes at the core of the arguments that Gladwell DIDN’T make. Godin defends his pal Anderson by building a straw man opponent and knocking it down and pretending that he knocked out Gladwell.

As Godin points out, ironically I have to pay to read Anderson’s Free which argues that information will now be free.

AFAICT Anderson’s argument is that since the incremental cost of distributing a new piece of information is zero, in a competitive environment information will be free.

Gladwell counters with:

1. Intellectual property rights matter. Despite the fact that songs can be stolen online, Apple is making a fortune off of iTunes. Some suckers just respect other people’s property and purchase their creations. Go figure.
2. The world already knows other models where negligible incremental costs don’t create low prices. The pharmaceutical industry recoups its R&D costs by making tremendous margins on individual pills. The industry will continue to thrive unless thwarted by government confiscation of their intellectual property.
3. There are many possible models that can and do work. Cable TV stations are doing just fine with their pay models, despite free TV. Apple can try to maximize revenue on iPhones and give away iTunes, or sell iPhones at a loss to maximize iTune revenue. Let’s not presume we know what strategy work. In short, it’s far too early to declare the Free model the ultimate winner. We’ll see.

Gladwell has me convinced. Anderson will sell a lot of books (which seems to contradict his thesis) but his simplified thesis is extremely flawed.

Godin had me convinced too … until I realized that he had knocked down his own straw man argument, and not the arguments Gladwell actually made.