Is That a Mole or Google SideWiki?

Mole's can a clutching appendage that is annoying to anyone. 

Last week, Google announced “SideWiki” a new feature of the Firefox and IE browsers (Chrome to come soon) that allows anyone to contribute comments about any webpage. 

To me, this new feature is absolutely incredible to our business.  The scope of this feature is far reaching.  Now every Website and every page on that site becomes a social platform.

I actually had a potential client comment on this yesterday stating, "I'm not sure this activity is going to stick - we don't really pay much attention to these social tools like blogs and twitter."  Yet again, I cannot believe people like this still exist in positions of power in a marketing department.  To this client, social media is a mole.  

I found this impact breakout and thought it did a good job of encapsulating the announcement of this new feature.

Control Over the Corporate Website Is Shifting To The Customers:

1. Customers trust each other more than you –now they can assert their voices “on” your webpage. Every webpage on your corporate website, intranet, and extranet are now social. Anyone who accesses these features can now rely on their friends or those who contribute to get additional information. Competitors can link to their competing product, consumers can rate or discuss the positive and negative experiences with your company or product.
2. Yet, don’t expect everyone to participate –or contribute valuable content. While social technology adoption is on the rise, not everyone writes, rates, and contributes content in every location, likely those who have experienced the product, influential, or competitors will be involved. Secondly, content created in this sidebar may be generally useless. To be successful, Google will need it to look more like Wikipedia than YouTube comments
3. Expect Google to integrate this feature with existing systems. Google recently launched profiles, a feature that is the foundation for extending their social reach. With large social networks like Gmail already in place (That’s right, email is a social network) they can eventually sort content on SideWiki by context of friends, experts, or other sources.  Google’s strategy is to ‘envelope’ the web this is typical of their approach.
4. Although early, expect other social networks to launch competing features. Facebook has already created an ‘inlay’ so you can view links shared in the Facebook newspage in the context of your friends –expect them to grow this feature out shortly.