Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: SalonHerringWiredFool.Com

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:10/27/1999; 8:13:07 AM
Topic:SalonHerringWiredFool.Com
Msg #:12405 (In response to 12402)
Prev/Next:12404 / 12406

Benoit Cazenave wrote:

I'm not sure companies like to have their names blended with other companies names. With all this 'building an Internet brand' stuff going on I'm not sure they would like it.

The problem with "all this 'building an Internet brand'" nonsense is that a stupendous number of companies are attempting to do it as rapidly and spammingly as possible because, in the final analysis, there's no "there" there, i.e. they don't proffer a valuable good or service upon which to build an enduring relationship with a community. They're hoping to establish a "brand" so that when the inevitable competition comes, their name is already at the tips of people's tongues and the competition suffers. Case in point: amazon.com. There's nothing unique about Amazon. It's easy to build a site that does what Amazon does, and only mildly challenging to do it better. (Keeping such a site up 24/7 is the hard part.) Barnes and Noble limped into the market late, and when they did, they neglected to provide for reader comments on books--the one major feature that an online bookstore can provide that a brick-and-mortar bookstore can't.

Contrast with epinions.com: the more people they get, the more are likely to write reviews. The more who write reviews, the better the useful reviews are likely to be (the point of the rating system). The better the useful reviews get, the more people go to epinions.com... this is how you build a sustainable business on the web. And since the sets of reviewers and things to review are both finite, this can't help but take value away from competing rating sites. There's no question that epinions.com is "building a brand," but unlike an amazon.com there's a "there" there, at least in the sense that, even if you could build a better epinions.com, it's not clear there'd be a market for it.

The bottom line here would seem to be that short-sighted organizations worry about things like "SalonHerringWiredFool.Com" affecting their "brand," while farther-sighted organizations worry about earning a brand.

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