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.

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?