If you ever have a moment of doubt over the influence, scope and power of the World Wide Web, consider this: in February of this year singer, songwriter, pop star and self-proclaimed avant-garde artist Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, more commonly known as Lady Gaga, released a music video for her track Telephone (feat. Beyoncé). It featured 10 well-known brands during the 3.40-minute clip, and to date has been viewed more than a billion times, making it, according to The Guardian newspaper in the UK, the most popular video clip online, ever. In terms of audience numbers, that’s around one seventh of the world’s population.

With every viewing, Virgin Mobile, Diet Coke, the Plentyoffish.com dating website, Quentin Tarantino (by way of the Kill Bill Pussywagon car), Honey Bun breakfast pastry, Double-Breasted Drive Thru, Polaroid, Wonderbread and Miracle Whip mayonnaise were given invaluable airtime.

The internet is often considered an unwieldy beast: a labyrinth of information and services that some find intimidating, others liberating. With the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube, the internet has also become a serious player in the way big business carries out its marketing activities. Thanks to the ease in which people can communicate and share information via these sites, peer-to-peer recommendations are becoming a valuable source of information, and consumers are increasingly becoming micro-entrepreneurs determined to make a little money from their online efforts. Think of the audience and potential consumer base at your disposal if your idea or comment is as risqué as Lady Gaga’s video.

Craig Davis, co-chairman and chief creative officer of Publicis Mojo and the founder of BrandKarma (a brand-focused social media platform), believes that “what the internet does is create a platform where transparency becomes an inevitability”. He is in a unique position to offer this sage observation. A little over two years ago, Davis was living in London working as the worldwide chief creative officer for advertising agency JWT. Prior to that he spent 10 years in Hong Kong as regional executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi. Yet upon his return to Sydney he started ruminating on a way to critique big-business ethics and practices: a surprising career turn considering he has built a solid career spinning tales for corporations through advertising.

These musings led to the creation of BrandKarma, a website that taps into the social networking phenomena but has the idealistic aim to ‘make the world better – one brand at a time’. Speaking with Davis, a well-versed conversationalist who can elaborate on the difficulties of setting up telecommunications in Papua New Guinea as eloquently as describing the challenges of branding the Botswana government, he seems genuinely curious to discover whether he can prompt big business to do better.

The internet has become profoundly empowering and enormously influential, Davis explains, because it allows people to voice their opinions on any number of topics, including their favourite or least-favourite company, without mediation or editing.

Author Rachel Botsman, co-author of The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, expands on this trend by pointing out a few extraordinary examples of the way the internet has created a valuable sense of community and allowed people to affect change in their day-to-day lives. Speaking at a TedX conference in Sydney in May, she claimed that in the US there are currently 1000 more farmers markets than there are Walmarts. What this suggests is that people are turning away from big consumer outlets in favour of community-orientated markets. This trend is further elaborated with instances of social money-lending sites such as Zopa, car sharing (GoGet), collaborative travel (Air BnB ) and neighbourhood garden schemes. The rise of social networking has diminished the power of the big companies to set the tone of consumerism.

BrandKarma has become a hub for this peer-to-peer demographic. Davis believes there is a “growing understanding that consumption has implications and consequences around it”. Not all products are made equal, and people are becoming interested in where a product comes from and how it is produced. This information is being filtered through the internet, not necessarily the company that makes the product. “Increasingly people are relying on once another for information,” Davis explains. “Conversation has real value when enough people are contributing.”

BrandKarma is designed as a kind of hybrid website merging aspects of aggregated news sites such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast with social networking tools and functions. It is packaged into a vibrant, colourful interface that offsets the serious tone of much of the content.

On BrandKarma, news stories relating to 300 brands, from airlines to food products to sportswear and automobiles, are fed into the site, where users (who register and log in before commenting and participating) can give feedback on articles and debate threads. Every element of user participation relating to a particular brand has an effect on a flower graphic, by way of a complex algorithm designed into the back end of the website. The five petals of the flower represent customers, investors, employees, suppliers and the planet. As the flower grows and mutates, it gives users a sense of how the brand is viewed in a holistic sense.

The system may seem convoluted and complex for the average web user, but for savvy social networkers it’s a tried-and-tested system, based on a basic love/hate relationship.

But what is the point?

Davis says that sustainability and good business practices are important to many, and he is simply tapping into a conversation that is already happening online and in the labour movements and consumer-rights organisations.

“We created BrandKarma to make it easy for you to see brands holistically and to share your opinions about them wherever and whenever you’re on the web,” states the BrandKarma manifesto. “Brands live at the heart of the global economy and affect us all, and the world’s biggest brands touch millions of people and have a huge impact on the world for better and for worse.”

For sceptics, Davis explains that the modus operandi of BrandKarma is a genuine desire to do good. His personal ethics are centred on generosity, attentiveness and owning up to your mistakes; the qualities, he says, “you were taught by your mum”. Too many backroom dealings and too much spin doctoring takes place in the global marketplace for Davis’s liking, it seems.

Transparency is key to the success of BrandKarma. While users are required to include their personal details when registering, the website is open about the fact that opinions will be collated and personal details factored into arguments, with the aim that (eventually) companies will become aware of the BrandKarma rating on their products. Unlike websites such as Peoplebrowsr.com, which aggregates information from social networking sites to package and sell back to a company so it can track what is being said about it in cyberspace, BrandKarma is first and foremost about activism with a small ‘a’, not commercial gain with a big ‘C’.

Australian internet entrepreneur Jodee Rich (who, backed by Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer, founded the controversial One.Tel telecommunications company that collapsed in 2001) recently declared his intention to replicate Peoplebrowsr.com for an Australian market.

“These networking sites are totally changing the way we gather information and make decisions across many different industries,” he said in a Sydney Morning Herald article announcing the launch of the website. “In North America, everyone is waking up to it with hundreds of companies following what is being said about them in real-time conversations,” he said.

But many users are concerned with commercial ventures such as this, because they are developed with personal information posted on social networking sites that users often assume, incorrectly, they have control over. Such ventures have fuelled protests such as Quit Facebook Day, a group made of 24,000-plus Facebook users dissatisfied with the less-than-transparent privacy policies of the successful networking site.

When prompted to explain how BrandKarma is any different from the plethora of initiatives collating online users’ personal data, Davis explains:

“BrandKarma is very different. It’s a platform for holistic brand conversations for brand activists and advocates."

When one registers to use BrandKarma you sign up to become part of that activist voice. As the BrandKarma 'about us' elaborates: "We believe in action – that we are what we do ... the more people get involved and the more active you are in the community, the faster we’ll make our presence felt."

Davis believes that in the past century we've moved from a world about products, to one created around consumers and now we’re moving to a world about community.

In simple terms, BrandKarma provides an opportunity to strengthen those community ties  and to ask ourselves what kind of a world do we want to live in? What kind of a world do we want to leave our kids? It is an ambitious project, but Davis likes to quote Albert Einstein, who once said: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

brandkarma.com