There was a great deal of controversy last week about the launch of Brands in Public. Engineered by the now infamous guru of social media, Seth Godin, the service collates consumer/customer comments from the web on a branded page. Seth is charging brands $400 a month to brands to have access to the site, so that they can manage their reputation. And whilst they can’t remove the negative comments, the rationale for forking out cash is that companies will be able to rebutt any attack.

Aside from the brandjacking of a company’s reputation, there is still no real benefit to brands participating in this way. Just for starters, like all hostage situations, if you give in to Seth, then a whole rash of aggregator sites will optimise for the search engines and start demanding ever increasing fees. After all, the monitoring tools used in this mash-up are all free and pretty basic.

What really makes this service significant is that it reveals how brands are still at the periphery of being social: cautiously dipping their toes in a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page. The focus has been on dedicating resource to a couple of platforms and the chatter outside of that has been largely ignored. This makes Seth’s open and very public aggregation of comment scary. It brings all consumer brand views sharply to the fore. Forcing some brands to react and hand over their money.

The painful truth is there is no fast way to manage reputation. It is not a series of campaigns or a reaction to every new site that pops up that might mention the brand. It needs to be a consistent brand voice; and that takes time. A lot of time.

A few weeks ago at a forum talking to in-house PRs and marketers I got the feeling that brands were on the cusp of this change. They had done the trials that made the senior teams more comfortable and now they needed the single unifying social media strategy.

The time to change is now. To address the immediacy of reputation issues that ‘Brands in Public’ and its ilk presents, companies need to think about making some small changes in practice that can protect the brand until the wider strategy is in place.

Moving beyond broadcast and promotional activity is essential. Whilst the practicalities of answering every question and every negative comment might be impossible to change quickly, brands must acknowledge that they exist. Initiatives that mirror the conversations and address the issues will put out the potential fires and amplifying the good chatter, brings advocates into the light.

Part of this process is ensuring all social media sings to the drumbeat of search. Too often SEO PR fails to go beyond the optimised press release. Yet it should thread its way though all social media conversations and marketing.

What better way than to keep Seth from your door than by keeping out him of your search engine rankings. And should a poor unfortunate consumer stumble upon the site, then your comments and responses will sit alongside the negatives ones. Giving your brand a voice without giving a penny to an aggregation site.