On January 2nd 2008 Seth Godin, a well-known online marketing expert, suggested that the first thing to do for the new year is Google yourself. Given that everyone else is probably googling you, he says, it is better you find out in what state your online reputation is. By April of the same year Business Week was already asking whether reputation services work, a sign of a new industry being born, whose mission is to discover what your online image is and if needs be help you protect it.
The rate at which people are coming online and actually sharing identity information is increasing, as is the quantity and variety of information shared on services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. It is simply easier than ever for us to discover things about each other (and crucially about people that are not necessarily within our circle of friends). Comments on blogs, forums - even small things that were not quite aware at the moment we did them leave a trace. All someone has to do is look for it.
But what exactly do reputation services do - how can they track your online reputation and, in the case you want it, change it. Here I take a look at five such services.
Reputation Defender
- Reputation Defender tries to simplify the task of actually figuring out what is out there about you and - in a rather smart marketing move - what is being said about your child ("guard your child's future"). The service is not overly expensive at $15 a month. If you wish they can also work on your behalf to "destroy" undesirable information, and while they claim high success rates they do admit that there are no guarantees they will actually be able to remove something from the web.
If you want them to be proactive (rather than purely defensive) and create an online reputation for yourself they are willing to help - starting at just $99 they can "ensure search results display the information YOU want others to see when searching for you on Google and other major search engines." Invest $500 and you get what amounts to personal PR for the web.
The tools behind the services seems to be a mixture of search tools and humans reasoning about the results and preparing reports for clients to see. The "destroy" and "promote" services seem to be mostly human-powered with technology to simply speed up some aspects of it. There is little or no mention of social networks or mining information from them on their main website although their blog seems to talk more about those.
garlik & qdos
- Garlik departs from the "identity theft" risk perspective - something that is constantly talked about in the UK where garlik is based. They will monitor the web for you, produce weekly updates, and alert you if there is too much personally sensitive information out there that might put you at risk of identity theft. The service only costs £2.99 a month.
The team behind garlik is impressive - leaving aside the significant business know-how and tech prowess of the managing team - at the science level they have one of the leading experts on issues of identity and information mining - Prof Nigel Shadbolt - as their Chief Technology Officer, while advisors include Timothy Berners-Lee (no intros required there) and Dame Wendy Hall.
The same people behind garlik also offer a free service they say will also calculate your QDOS (get it...kudos...) - a measure of your online popularity based on how active you are, what impact you have and your own individuality. Judging on their results it seems to work best for the really active and well known personalities of varying fields - with a heavy sland on those that are active on the web (inevitably) as can be seen from their top academics list.
There are few hints about what exact technologies are used - but judging on who their CTO and advisors are one can assume that Semantic Web technologies and other related work of Southampton University will have played a crucial role.
RapLeaf
- RapLeaf is another entrant in the track your reputation (they call it online footprint) area. This time there is a clear focus on "social media" as a source of information, but they will also search normal web pages and the "deep web".
They divide their offering into Business Solutions and People Solutions. The business solutions have a clear mandate - help business find out more about their clients through the traces clients leave on social media. They also offer partnership opportunities for advertising agencies that want to resell the RapLeaf solutions to their customers.
A really nice solution they have is integrating their product with Salesforce.com so you have built-in search on your clients right within your CRM.
The people-focused side of things is not as clear - as there is litte information given upfront and you need to sign-in to find out more. I assume that they use the same tools they make available to businesses to allow individuals to track their reputation online.
pipl
- pipl is the simplest service to get into - it brings the search engine paradigm to people search - so you type in some information about the person you are interested in (name and location) and pipl will search the "deep web", as they call it, to come up with information about that person.
It seems to work best the more unique your name is and the more information you give it about a person. Entering a few names of people I know it is not that bad - the photo feature, which pulls photos from various places that it thinks represent the person you are talking about, is quite fun.
The technology behind pipl.com is based on searching the areas of the web that traditional search engines don't handle that well - what they call the "deep web". They have specialised crawlers that to mine websites such as amazon.com, myspace, flickr, etc.
pipl doesn't make any claims about reputation management, but by virtue of the fact that it allows you to create a profile of what is available about you online it goes a long way towards helping you.
spock
- spock makes very similar claims to pipl above, although it takes a wider approach to people search. Rather than only accepting a name and place it allows you to search for any keyword - so soccer player will give you information about Beckham and Ronaldo while a search for "criminal" gives as a first result Osama Bin Laden and second result Martha Stewart!
The interface of spock in not as clean as the pipl one (a bit too many ads) - but the generalised keyword search can be quite interesting.
Conclusions
The range of services available is quite interesting - they all offer a good idea of what is available about you online and some even offer ways for you to manage what is available online. It is quite interesting to see that some of the Semantic Web luminaries are involved in this space and that the notion of customer relationship management enhanced by information mined directly on the web can already be built in to your business system.
If any generalised conclusion can be drawn is the existence of such companies makes managing online information all the more important as what is available about you online can truly impact on your everyday life.
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