Just saw an interesting post on mashable – Tiffany & Co. Releases User-Generated Map of World's Romantic Moments. While the idea of the application itself is not galvanizing, the comment by Lauren – that they would have been better served if they had leveraged existing platforms such as Facebook or Tumblr – really caught my eye. I am not sure of the thought process that might have gone on at Tiffany to create the micro-site, but can relate to the central issue of control of the content.
Companies while on one hand are trying their hardest to embrace the concept of content travel, they have not yet figured out a way to address the issue of partial content reuse. If you put content on someone else’s platform, you have no control over how that content gets reused. The issue with this “uncontrolled” reuse is the legal and/or the social liability the company would face in case of any improper usage.
The strange bit is that improper partial usage is not really prevented by hosting the content on your own site – as is evident by all the phishing scams going on, forget your content, even your sacrosanct logo is not safe in these cases. Of course, the law understands this – as do the general public… no one feels badly about Paypal even after they have been scammed using the Paypal name.
So while there is a possibility of misuse, it is important for companies to weigh the benefits of leveraging social platforms – the fact that it makes it easy for your content to live far beyond your focussed marketing spend, the fact that individual elements may far outlive and outperform the whole, the possibility that creative reuse and repurposing of your content may provide access to a whole new audience that you never intended in the first place.
As companies embrace the new rules of the social – the always connected – the “120 characters or less” – CONTROL will be the enigma.
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