GaggleAMP is touting itself as the first social media platform that allows brands to make it easy for their employees, partners or resellers to share the brand’s social media updates. They refer to is as ‘honking’ since, I suppose, a goose honking is way louder than a bird tweeting. I know, it’s one of those clever marketing things that kind of make you wretch a little bit.

Other than their use of the word ‘honking’, I don’t object to GaggleAMP, in theory. In fact, it makes a lot of sense. Here’s how it works. People sign into GaggleAMP and join a “gaggle” (which is a better word choice for a group of animals than a “murder” but not as good as a “pride” in my opinion). Anyway, then the company posts content on social media sites, as normal.

Gaggle AMP then alerts the members of the gaggle that there are messages they can share (called ‘honking’). People log into the site, see which messages the company has posted (and on which social networks) and, from there, the person can choose to share those messages on their own social networks. “This process can even be automated!” the website proudly yells…which, of course, is the company’s ultimate dream.

The theory is that, when a brand tweets something, only the people who happen to be looking at their Twitter stream are going to notice it. However, if the company’s resellers have a site to log into and see the complete list of compiled messages A) no messages get missed and B) the Resellers retweet everything directly to the end-user that the company is trying to reach.

For example, I may not follow Nokia cell phones on their corporate account. But if I follow Best Buy, then I will now be seeing Nokia’s social media updates via Best Buy.

Sound good? Sure, to Nokia Corporate. But not so fast. When it’s a company asking (read: forcing) their employees and business partners to do this? Yuck.

Even if it’s not direct coercion, the implies threat of not joining the ‘gaggle’ is impossible to miss.

“Hi, I sign your paycheck and, just so you know, whether or not you are a ‘teamplayer’ and ‘ready to move up the ladder’ will be influenced by how much you participate in my gaggle. Do you think you’d like to join?”

I’m sure the company gets plenty of honkers, although most begrudgingly.

Now, this would work perfectly for a Facebook fan page. If I ‘like’ the fanpage of a band, then it would be awesome for me to have a place to log
in and see a curated, complete list of all their tweets, wall posts, YouTube uploads, etc so I can easily send them out through my social networks. But that’s only because I chose to be a willing participant – there is no forced honking.

So maybe the idea is good but the implementation is wrong? Can’t wait to watch this one play out.