Mick Liubinskas

Setting up a room on FF seems to be a good option for doing this. That way, you're not seen as a total interloper friending random strangers left and right -- if someone wants to keep up to date on your brand, they join the room. Of course, you'd be stupid not to try to recruit a few people into the room to start, but would have to tread lightly and look for people who already demonstrate a loyalty to and interest in your brand. Would I join a Starbucks room? Sadly, yes. - Kate via FriendFeed MT Plugin

Agree with gregory_lent, as brandstreaming will be a big hurdle for the bigger companies. It sounds great, but to be effective in lifestreaming, a person or brand already has to be using the tools (and do them well) that feed into a life/brand stream. It's obvious why a company like Pandora will do well with brandstreaming, as they are already engaged on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. The companies that Twitter via an RSS feed, set up a Facebook account because everyone else did, has a YouTube channel with no new activity, and posts new blog entries once a month, will not have an impact with their brandstreaming efforts. Instead, they should pick one or two sites to focus their efforts on, engage a growing community, and then graduate to brandstreaming when it becomes the next step, not the next big thing. - Lauren Beyer via FriendFeed MT Plugin

Social is about people, brands are about a business - it has to be about real people who stream it - Mrinal Desai

Richard, this is a very important post. Brandstreaming is going to become more pervasive over the next year and is already in play with certain companies who realize the potential for aggregating content produced by the people representing the brand. I'm also not sure that Pheedo coined "brandstreaming" as Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Stowe Boyd and I have been discussing brandstreams going back to the first series of conversations around lifestreams. Most recently Jeremiah Owyang and I discussed FriendFeed as the most likely candidate for brandstreaming in today's social media market (you can see the term brandstreaming in comment #24 in Jeremiah's post that you linked to). You've heard that old saying, "your reputation precedes you." On the social web, a brand's reputation is now in the hands of people as well...aggregating relevant and interesting content will help unify a company's presence online and help steer conversations in a positive direction. - Brian Solis via FriendFeed MT Plugin

Hi Richard and others - Lucia here, from Pandora. This is an interesting conversation! I have to say though, I don't think of what I do as "brandstreaming." I go where there are fans of Pandora, and I communicate with them. I think of my activity on Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. as kind of a scattered forum and listener advocacy. People find it pretty handy to have me available for questions and suggestions, and I share their feedback with our staff. Twitter and FriendFeed aren't a pulpit for me so much as friendly fan club / help desk. My community manager role is basically an outbound version of what we've been doing passionately for three years - listening to our listeners. :) Lucia (Community Manager at Pandora) - Pandora Radio

first we had embedded reporters, now we've got embedded pr men? - linkman77

Brian, thanks for pointing out prior use of the term 'brandstreaming'. I did a google search for it before publishing this, but Pheedo came out top and I didn't see any other major uses of it in the google results. But in any case I've updated the post now with a note. - Richard via FriendFeed MT Plugin

We've never called it Brand-streaming, but we make sure every startup we work with does this at the right time. It's a great way to 'be discoverable' by people looking for service/product out in the wild web, but it's also a great way to connect and live your personality. Companies must absolutely get out and participate beyond their sites, especially for startups where most of their customers don't know who they are yet. It is a challenge for big companies because it's a participation thing, not a control thing. You have to be real. I also don't think it's a normal communications channel because it's not synchronous - i.e. I don't know whether you'll get the message because it's a stream (like Twitter) not a ordered queue (like email, or some email). That's what makes it good. You've got to go with the flow to get joy. - Mick Liubinskas via FriendFeed MT Plugin