Enhance your reputation online

Internet has come a long way in making a huge impact in
changing consumer relationships and conversations, thus marking a giant leap
from the offline to the online world. In earlier days, if a consumer had to buy
a house, he would first search for the most reliable real estate broker in the
locality. Most of the feedback a consumer got about a real estate broker was
through word of mouth by either past clients of the broker or by his/her
friends. A persons reputation was the most important criteria of building up a
base of credibility and trust, apart from a relationship that continues to
follow!

With the ever increasing growth of web traffic, online professional
reputation sites have been doing wonders for few corporates and individuals.
There are examples such as the Whuffie Bank (www.thewhuffiebank.org) and Naymz (www.naymz.com).
Whuffie Bank is a non-profit organization that tracks the public activity of an
individual on social networking sites and analyzes his/her online reputation. On
similar lines Naymz is a networking platform for professionals who want to
advance to the next level in their career. Naymz philosophy is simple: a good
professional reputation is the key to effectively network with other
professionals.

Social networking has now added one more name to its community, and this time
it is Unvarnished (http://www.getunvarnished.com/beta) in beta version, a
professional networking site. All one needs (to connect and create an account)
is to have a Facebook account to get started. Unvarnished requires a Facebook
account for registration as it helps to show that the user is a legitimate
participant in the conversation. Another important criteria which the new
website has benchmarked is that the user has to be twenty-one years old and
above to use the site. Interestingly, the developers who have created the new
website have warned that if the Facebook account appears to be fake and recently
created for the purposes of submitting illegitimate content, the user account
will be removed from the site, along with all reviews left by the user.

Unvarnished is an online resource for building, managing and researching
professional reputation, created marginally on the lines of LinkedIn. While
LinkedIn users will be able to moderate their profile, Unvarnished users cannot
make any moderations as well as erase reviews.

Unvarnished reviews also help in providing assessments of co-workers,
potential hires, business partners and more. The site also obscures the identity
of review authors and allows reviewers to share their unbiased opinions without
the fear of repercussions. The suite of tools provided by the site also allows
the community to rate and moderate views.

While reviewer identities are hidden from reviews, the quality of an
individual reviewers submissions, as rated by fellow Unvarnished users
contributes to a Reviewer Authority score. A badge is also attached to each
review by a given reviewer.

Lastly, an Unvarnished profile can be created either by an individual for
themselves or, alternatively, by an individual for another professional in order
to review them. By creating their own profile, or claiming the one that was
created for them, professionals can take control of and build their professional
reputation. Profile owners can manage and build their reputation by receiving
notifications of new reviews, requesting reviews from trusted colleagues, adding
resume details, and responding to reviews. A key advantage for Unvarnished here
would be the huge number of Facebook users worldwide who can create an account
in Unvarnished and get started.

However, online reputation has come a long way and Internet has played a
pivotal role in shaping up the reputation of either an individual or an
organization in a matter of seconds. Online reputation is the new buzzword in
the Internet era and most users take the online reputation sites seriously.
After all its all about their reputation in the online world!

PC Suraj

surajp@cybermedia.co.in