Can Reddit Grow Up?

“People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers,” said Brian Blau, an Internet analyst with Gartner Research. ‘Can Reddit deliver that over time?’” - Can Reddit Grow Up? - NYTimes

Brands don’t want to have real relationships with their customers in public. A real relationship has ups and downs, and downs need to be handled with discretion. Brands on Twitter are happy to converse about the good, but they take the bad into private DMs.

Reddit’s functionality encourages long form discussion (relative to Twitter), thanks to no character limits and the nature of threaded discussions (where popular comments float to the top). Old Reddit threads stay around longer than Twitter. This means the stakes are higher, and only a very self-secure brand can confidently walk into an environment where mockery and trolling among peers is common (with the mandatory ability to ignore or laugh off a joke), and faux pas are more permanent than Twitter.

Reddit may make money through ad sales. They may also find luck in helping brands find a path through the environment & Reddit culture. Creating and selling engagement tools in a Social CRM sense (Lithium/Klout, Zemanta, HootSuite) may ultimately prove most fruitful, as it has for the rest of the social economy.