In business, your online reputation is as important as your offline one, if your business is to succeed. It is extremely important to be open, transparent and engage with customers as you would face to face. With the emergence of more and more social networking sites it is becoming increasing harder to keep up with it all. My initial reaction to the sites I am asked to join is.. “Oh no, not another one!” Running 3 businesses, a family and a home, do I really want to update anymore??
Over the past few days I have received lots of emails asking about visible.me and what it is?, Should I join? As a great believer in social media for business, I decided to do some research and try to find out what I could about it.
1. It used to be called naymz (names}
2. It relaunched last week as visible.me
3. Its co~founder is Tom Drugan
4. It is primarily a B2B social networking platform
5. It enables users to build an online reputation
6. It has third party associations with online identity site Trufina, (only relevant for the US) and reputation.com (both are paid services)
7. The majority of it's features are not available in a free account
8. Enables you to connect with colleagues and friends in a similar way to LinkedIn
9. You can build a reputation score based on interaction, connections and endorsements
10. You can check who is viewing or has viewed your profile (paid version)
As a UK user, I can't see that it has anymore benefits than those offered on LinkedIn, in fact it seems to have a lot less. There are also plenty of free ways to make a decision to do business with someone or not.
It may make sense if you are trading with people and businesses in the US, but even then, there are enough review sites for you to make an informed decision of whether to do business with them or not. I am juggling more than enough accounts on social media sites, so to add another one, in order to connect with all the people I am already connected to doesn't make sense. You can link all your updates across all platforms but then I end up like Grandma, telling the same story 5 times to the same people.....followers soon stop following, I know I do!!
Here are some tips on keeping an eye on your Online Reputation that came from Mashable:
“One of the best ways to track your progress is a simple Google search. “I’m conscious that I’m writing about the things I’d liked to be found for,” Naslund said. “If I’m going to post a tweet about a drunken bender with my sister from last night, it might pop up on Google.” Make sure you’re updating your social networks on news and events that you want to be known for. Part of managing your online identity is understanding your professional profiles (like LinkedIn) can very well get mixed up with personal profiles (like Facebook). “You can’t keep the peas from touching the mashed potatoes,” Naslund added. “The Internet doesn’t distinguish between profiles. That’s a human distinction, not a technical one. It all gets lumped into the same basket.”
An easy, free way to manage your name’s SEO is by getting onto popular social media sites. “Twitter accounts often pop up on the first page even if you’ve only posted three tweets,” Benton explained. “Chances are you’d rather have that and a link to your bio page than something you don’t have control over. Get on networks with good page rankings.”
Another tip for optimizing SEO is by proactively setting up inbound links between your profiles. Include links to your social profiles, such as Foursquare, Twitter, LinkedIn and Quora, on your blog. On your Twitter profile, include a link to your blog. And on Foursquare, make sure you include your Twitter profile link. If you already use multiple networks, this practice is an easy way to increase the amount of inbound links for each site. It’s a circle of links that will help optimize your Google search rankings.
The ultimate goal is to optimize your SEO so that someone should be able to search for your name and get a good idea within the first 10 results of who you are or who you’d like to be.”
Read the full article on Mashable: http://mashable.com/2010/07/06/clean-social-media-identity/
You can also connect with Tom Drugan on LinkedIn and ask him about the benefits of his site in the UK
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tdrugan
Another good source of info is Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_identity_management
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