Reputation Management: It's All About the Database

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February 21, 2008

Reputation Management: It's All About the Database

BostonNOW, which appears to aggregate copy from a number of Boston television and radio stations, is very excited about "caller ID for the Internet."

"Fifty million times a day, someone, somewhere 'Googles' a person's name. Now, technology can help you figure out who's Googling you.

"Elizabeth Yekhtikian admits she's hooked on the visitor tracking service from Ziggs.com, a site similar to Facebook.com that caters to young professionals. At least once a day she gets an email alerting her she's been checked out."
"'I can check on the site and it shows me with little maps where the searches are coming from, and from exactly which town, within which state or part of the country or the world,' said Yekhtikian. 'That's kind of cool.'"

Of course, Ms. Yekhtikian, whose Ziggs profile indicates she works for PR firm Blanc & Otus, would think that: Ziggs is a Blanc & Otus client.

So the reporter got caught by one company-supplied shill ... no big deal ... the reporter had a backup source happily using Naymz, a service pitched as an identity/reputation management tool:

"A similar site, naymz.com, helped Katie May figure out that an ex-boyfriend, with whom she didn't want to maintain contact, had been searching online for her.

"'He works for a university and all those searches were coming from that university,' said May."

Ms. May just so happens to be an "advertising account executive" with Bagby and Company, Inc.. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that both Naymz.com and Bagby are based in Chicago.

Anyhow, shill-to-real-people ratios aside, the article glosses this new "technology" providing the miraculous ability to see who's Googling for you: It's Google AdWords. Premium memberships in both Naymz and Ziggs buy paid placements that turn up either in the premium slot over organic search results, or over in the traditional right-hand "Sponsored links box." Ziggs packages it as the WebPro service, and Naymz ties it all in to something it calls RepScore, a number somewhere between one and ten, which is tied, in turn, to RepScore Points. RepScore Points are earned several ways:

"Community verification," which is driven by other Naymz users, who score each other.
"Profile completeness," which involves a number of point rewards for providing extra personal information (nicknames, employer, city, tags, links and photos).
"Identity verification," which involves either buying a "Verified ID" from Trufina or signing up for a premium account at Naymz.

The points system is set up such that filling out everything required for a complete profile still puts the user well short of earning the "Perks" required for Google AdWords: That takes either buying the premium membership or paying for a Trufina background check.

What's Naymz doing with all these points-earning bits of personal information? The privacy policy offers the usual, bland "we won't sell your information to anyone" boilerplate that has nuggets like:

"Naymz may disclose and transfer your Personal Information to a third party who acquires all or a substantial portion of Naymz' business, whether such acquisition is by way of merger, liquidation, dissolution, consolidation or sale of all or a substantial portion of our business, trade or assets."

and

"Naymz may disclose your Personal Information to companies and individuals it employs to perform services on its behalf that are necessary for operation of the Site and the Naymz Services, including hosting Naymz' web servers, analyzing data, processing credit card payments, and providing customer service."

"Personal Information" means "stuff with your name specifically attached to it. It's important to remember that you, specifically, do not matter to the companies that would want to buy Naymz' "assets" (e.g. its user database). What does matter is how completely what you want can be anticipated by sliding you into a demographic generalization, creating a feedback loop of your specific information being rendered into generalizations that eventually find their way back to you in the form of personalized pitches and come-ons aimed at whatever demographic pigeon-hole you occupy.

Anyhow, some of the "services" Naymz provides come from its sibling company, ListenMedia, which specializes in "social media marketing." If you've ever blogged about a bad experience with a company and had a representative pop up in the comments to drone about how sad they are that you're unhappy, outfits like ListenMedia are the reason they found your little five-pageview-a-day site. ListenMedia says it "Monitor[s] and track[s] what is being said online about your brand (blogs, social networks, forums, wikis, etc.)" and "Influence[s] the results by participating in the conversation and eliminating or properly addressing negative content."

In other words, they'll send shills to your favorite bbs, whitewash your wiki and otherwise "participate" all over your conversation.

There's something very complete about this kind of entry. I started out innocently enough wondering how, exactly, Elizabeth Yekhtikian knew who was Googling for her. Her profile led me to her company, and her company told me that the service she was so pleased with was one of her company's own accounts. Unless she disclosed her association with the companies involved and the reporter left that bit of information out, that's called "shilling." And by the time I'm done reading about the two companies providing "caller ID for the Internet," I go full circle to a company that specializes in "properly addressing" or "eliminating" negative content.

Not so different, really, from Rapleaf (see the links below), which also uses "reputation management" as a tool for aggregating personal data to make broader demographic generalizations it can, in turn, sell to other marketing people. Naymz, though, adds the neat trick of getting you to pay it to fatten its database with the information it's going to sell. Identity or reputation management is the perfect selling point because it's a little scary.

Katie May dutifully produced a story about "an ex-boyfriend, with whom she didn't want to maintain contact [...] searching online for her." It sounds sort of creepy and menacing, I guess, to the extent there's an unexpressed but implied relationship between searching for someone and initiating unwanted contact. Naymz, of course, does nothing at all about removing your information from the Web, and that anecdote is less about the actual details and more about the tone.

Why anyone would think that feeding even more personal information into yet another database that could be bought, sold, seized in bankruptcy or simply shared with a "partner" or corporate sibling would enhance their privacy or safety from stalking exes remains a mystery.

Previously:

(BostonNOW link via Pogo Was Right)