I was tempted to gloss over the details of the Google’s sidewiki announcement until I realized the implication for those of us involved in social media. Sidewiki is a product that allows users of Google’s tool bar to share their comments on any Web site. Now that this feature is enabled, it will become yet another area of focus for online reputation management.
Any user of Google toolbar can post any comment to your site, which could be cause for concern, especially for companies or products that tend to get mixed consumer reactions like car dealers, insurance companies, and direct response marketers.
There are some proactive steps you can take with sidewiki to help maintain your company, product or client’s online reputation. The first should be to take ownership of your site. A nice post with clear directions can be found on SearchNewz. Taking ownership of your site is important because Google will put owners’ sidewiki comments at the top, something that might help if there are negative sidewikis also posted. As shown in the SearchNewz post, you can take the opportunity to write something positive in your own sidewiki comments to explain your site, drive further inquiries with an 800 number, etc. So it can be one more outlet for positive conversation.
Another tactic to combat potential negative sidewiki comments is for site owners to proactively build rich, moderated reviews and comments sections to their own sites. This will likely draw more attention from consumers anyway, and might help offset any negative comments posted to sidewiki. It will be interesting to see how this new social outlet evolves over time and how quickly it catches on.