Naymz
I’ve had a few clients/contacts asking about Naymz recently, so I thought I’d start of the site reviews with some thoughts on Naymz.
At first glance, it’s another social network aimed at business users, mainly US focused and with a rating system within your network.
On sign up, as well as the usual invite your friends/contatcs through email address books, it also allows you to give them your LinkedIn or Plaxo details to invite your contacts – interesting – all the usual stuff is there, describe yourself, upgrade to premium to add these extra bits (ie linking to a personal domain).
Usage wise it all looks n feels, ok, nothing groundbreaking – the amount and positioning of Ads on the site is perhaps a bit excessive (too large and in the middle of the page – making some bit feel cluttered).
They’re slightly different to the usual networking sites though in that their main up-sell is “reputational repair” – confused?
If you search for your name on google and you don’t like the results, they’ll do their best to “repair” that reputation for you, to quote from their own site:
“I had a securities violation that was over 20 years old that kept coming to the top of Google for my name. Naymz was able to put a flood of positive information on the web about me that pushed down my old mistake.”
Michael P. – Financial Advisor
Now there are 2 things here that worry me:
1) They’ve set up their site in contrast to Google’s own guidance on best practice. The content of the website is not designed for a human visitor, it includes an A-Z type link chunk on each page as a way of trying to bolster its rankings for each name, click on one of those and you get an even uglier chunk of names, again purely for the Google spider. This probably works well, but note that Google could take a dim view on this and blacklist the site.
2) They will “flood” the Internet with positive information about you – there’s something that is almost (and for want of a better word) unethical about this. Surely knowing that a Financial Advisor had a Securities Violation in their history is something I should find? If he had other information on there to balance the search then this wouldn’t be such an issue. Flooding the world with my information, isn’t something I’d want a company to do.
Perhaps I’m missing a trick here, maybe there is more to Naymz than being just A.N.Other social networking site with an up-sell to “reputational repair” for people who don’t have much online presence… what do you think?
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