Hyundai USA has created a new website called Hyundai Momentum where they purport to aggregate voices about their products from across the web. The tagline is “Everything you need to know about Hyundai. As told by everyone, except Hyundai”.

Initially, I was really excited by this.

Social media commentators have for ages been labouring the point that brands are made or broken by the public, not by the company. You should thus be listening and engaging wherever conversations about your brand are taking place away from your own website.

On the surface, the implementation of Hyundai Momentum is very attractive, using a CoolIris (formerly PicLens) style wall of thumbnails. The panel of site representations extends seemingly infinitely both left and right and the huge numbers cycling in the top left corner reinforce the message that all these external websites say good things about Hyundai.

Unfortunately, once you dig a bit deeper, it turns out this is nothing more than your standard marketing exercise:

• The seemingly millions of thumbnails repeat. A lot. I could only find 30 actual different pages from maybe a dozen websites
• All stories linked are suspiciously gushing. No dissenting voices allowed
• There is no way to filter stories. If this were really pitched as a resource for car buyers, shouldn’t you give them an option to only see stories about a particular model?

Such a good premise. Such a letdown.

According to an article on ReadWriteWeb, Yelp.com – a restaurant review site sadly unavailable outside the US and UK – is now allowing owners of establishments to comment on reviews.

RWW withholds judgement on the new feature, stating simply that “Yelp will have to tread carefully with this as its user base, although fiercely loyal and protective of the service, is also usually very pro-consumer as well, and any move that looks like a concession or sellout to business interests might end up being harmful to its image down the road.“

They are being overly cautious. Allowing owners to reply to comments is a long overdue feature. Sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and even eBay are places for public conversations. In the spirit of the social web, their purpose is to level the playing field between providers and consumers, sellers and buyers, owners and visitors.

Level it, that is, not tilt it the other way. This is not 1917. We do not have to overthrow the tyrants of businesses and corporations, we simply want to have conversations on equal footing.

Both the websites mentioned above have recognised this. TripAdvisor lets hotel owners reply to each review posted about their establishment and eBay allows sellers to reply (once) to feedback left by buyers. In both cases these talkback options are invaluable to me as a user in assessing whether I want to stay at a particular guesthouse or purchase from a specific eBay seller.

On our honeymoon we had a shortlist of three resorts in Vanuatu and all looked attractive. What tipped the scales in one’s favour was that the manager actively replied to most reviews, taking ownership of problems, promising rectification and genuinely seeming to care. The actual visit bore this impression out.

Similarly, a key criterion for whether I want to buy from a specific seller on eBay is not so much whether they have a 98.6% or a 99.2% feedback score but rather how they deal with criticism. Do I want to buy from someone who responds to “Not happy. Money sent but never received item” with “YOU LIAR!!! LEARN TO READ BE4 LEAVING FEEDBACK MORON!!!” or “My fault, item was already sold elsewhere. Offered refund but got not response.”?

Authentic conversations give us an insight into how a potential partner in a transaction deals with difficult situations and help us make more informed decisions. And those conversations necessarily have two sides.

It has become very fashionable, especially among early adopters of web technology, to put absolutely everything in the cloud. Use GMail for your email, Saasu for your invoicing and accounting, Google Docs or Zoho for text documents and spreadsheets, Flickr or Facebook for your photos, YouTube, Vimeo or Seesmic for your videos and so forth.

There are undoubtedly advantages to storing your content online. You can access it from any computer, you don’t have to worry about loss or deterioration of the physical media it is stored on and it can be quite cheap if not free.

What does “in the cloud” really mean?  

But is your content really “stored in the cloud”? The metaphor implies distribution, redundancy, anonymity.

In actual fact, you have handed over your emails, documents, company records, photos, and videos to Google, Facebook, Saasu and Vimeo. These companies may or may not treat your content the way you would like them to.

Will you ever get it back?

Now I am not insinuating that these companies are likely to do evil things with your beloved content, although the Facebook new Terms of Use disaster (despite the subsequent retraction) made me think twice. I am simply suggesting that they are companies and as such can be purchased or go broke. I Want Sandy was purchased by Twitter and shut down. Deepmetrix was acquired by Microsoft and Livestats discontinued. Even Microsoft’s MSN Groups were killed off. And perhaps most prominently Ma.gnolia, which lost all of the data stored on it and with it possibly hundreds of thousands of hours of work by its users.

I have digital photos going back to 1996. Thinking back to that year, almost none of the websites that were big at the time are still around. Had I entrusted all my digital memories to them, who knows what would have become of them. Sharing is only one aspect of the digitisation of our lives and in our pursuit of it we often forget the other important aspect, that of keeping.

What about privacy protection?

Surely these web-only companies with impressive privacy statements which nobody reads have measures in place to safeguard our data? Turns out even the biggest player in the market has problems with that. In early March a bug in Google Docs caused widespread unwanted sharing of documents and required users to re-enter who they wanted to share them with.

Gary Barber has concerns about trust which I find very well thought-out and hard to brush aside. Others worry about what happens to their content once they die.

High availability?

There is a real accumulation of risk in a handful of big players. The GFail epidemic of late February has left millions of users without their emails, and it wasn’t the first GMail outage by a long shot. It demonstrated that even the 800 pound gorilla is far from perfect when it comes to availability.

While the introduction of Google Gears has alleviated the problem somewhat (you may not be able to send or receive email, but you can access your email history while the service is down), its introduction could be considered an admission by Google that the cloud and the browser cannot replace locally stored and processed content just yet.

As Kate Carruthers writes, it might be time to make a backup of some of that info that you’ve got floating around in the cloud.

Now what?
I’m a big fan of using the cloud to share my digital life and interact with those who matter to me, but I take care to

• Keep a local copy of everything
• Do local and off-site backups
• Put on the web only what I want to share

and wait with bated breath for the semantic web and redundant storage of content in the cloud.

Finally, that Larry Ellison calls cloud computing gibberish can safely be filed under simplistic knee-jerk (emphasis on the last word), but when Richard Stallman, creator of GNU and all-round guru says that cloud computing is a trap, it might pay to sit up and listen.

(Photo by Allan Henderson)

Now that Facebook is asking “What’s on your mind?“, will it leverage its vastly bigger user base and squeeze Twitter out of the market just as the latter was poised to launch into the mainstream?

I believe the question is a valid one. For starters, Facebook’s question is of course a much better one than Twitter’s tired “what are you doing?”, a legacy which defines the service and at the same time has been holding it back. The question as it is being asked now invites countless “having breakfast” and, more recently “watching Rove” tweets and is single-handedly responsible for the high abandon rate of new twitterers.

Only once new users realise that they shouldn’t answer the question “what are you doing”, but rather “what do you find interesting” or, as it were, “what’s on your mind?”, do they begin to find value in their use of Twitter.

Now superficially the signs look good for Facebook’s fending off of Twitter: It has a much broader user base and it is already an integral part of many people’s days.

But there is one crucial difference: Facebook is built around friend connections – people you know in real life. You can stay connected with them and know what’s on their mind. But if you’re anything like me, your Facebook friend list contains many a long-forgotten acquaintance or high school mate whose opinions or preoccupations you don’t really care that much about.

Twitter goes much further than this. Its connections are asymmetrical and non-reciprocal. You do not have to ask people permission to read their Twitter streams. And you can easily follow new people whose thoughts you find interesting and worthwhile.

Facebook may be here to strengthen your real-life relationships, but Twitter is here to extend them.

What do you think? Is the broaden-your-network effect important enough to let Twitter survive? Is it something else that will help it fend off the assault? Or is Twitter doomed to succumb to the Facebook juggernaut?

As far as the integration of social media and the wider web into brand marketing goes, Masterfoods has taken the approach pioneered by online agency Modernista! and run with it. They replaced the Skittles website with an overlay onto a Twitter search of the term “Skittles”.  

Predictably, everyone and their dog raced to try out how much abuse the food giant could take on their public facing site before pulling the plug. So far they haven’t.

The commentary is divided, but like whenever some new way of interacting with social media is tried out for the first time, the attention given to it is enormous.

What do you reckon? Is it a stupid stunt which will go away quickly? Have marketers run out of ideas? Or is it a sign of things to come?

Taking a cue from Whitney Hess, I have decided to publish my own Twitter Mosaic.

It is a collage of all the people I currently follow on Twitter. If you haven’t heard of Twitter, here is a good introductory article.

It is fun to cast your eye over these avatars and remember why you’re following them. Some have gone a bit quiet, others have just latched onto Twitter and have already found great ways to interact with their own community.

Have a look at this great and diverse group, follow some of them and get your own Twitter Mosaic here for your own blog.