One of the most interesting things about search is the way mash-ups, start-ups and third-party developments can flip back and forth over the fence separating consumer uses from business or marketing uses. Projects that get their start as useful tools for one group can very quickly be adapted to be useful for anyone promoting a product or service on the Web.
Case in point: a spate of services that have grown up in the last year to improve and safeguard personal reputations on the Web. It’s almost a cliché now that private individuals are getting put into search queries for a host of reasons, from job applications and business sales calls to real or prospective first dates and marriage proposals.
Given that, it was just about inevitable that someone would come up with a service that uses search to help people play up their good traits online and take some of the spotlight off those online flaws they might not be so proud of.
We’re not talking anything that’s a matter of public record here; prospective employers and spouses are still going to be able to find out about felonious assault convictions and bankruptcies. And because the Web is the closest thing we’ve got to a fountain of youth when it comes to content, those embarrassing Spring Break photos your buddies took and tagged to Flickr will still be there. But the aim of these services is to give the profile you want to present to the world as much prominence as possible, taking the focus off that Web video of you singing karaoke with your cat.
One of the services, a Chicago-based start-up called Naymz, not only builds you a personal profile page and optimizes it for organic search but also buys your name as a Google keyword and serves up a sponsored listing with a link to that profile when anyone comes Googling for you.
“We say we give individuals a voice in their search engine results and kind of claim what is and isn’t about them,” says co-founder Tom Drugan. “The generation coming up all have their blogs, their MySpace and Facebook pages. But these platforms aren’t really good at optimizing that information for the search engines and getting it indexed. We provide a quick and easy way to do that.”
Users can sign up for a free Naymz account and create their profile page right away, personalizing it with a photo, a bio and links to any other content they might have on the Web, including blogs, online photo albums, MySpace pages, or profiles in the LinkedIn business network.
Naymz then optimizes that page for discovery by search engines, including making sure the page content is properly tagged and submitting the content through XML Sitemaps to get it found more quickly. That way, searchers looking for you in engines will most likely see your Naymz profile above the fold on the first search results page—about 90% of the time, according to the company’s claims.
Naymz also instructs profile creators in the ABCs of optimizing their own pages, primarily by making sure the content is refreshed regularly and by placing Naymz buttons on their blogs and social net pages to create more inbound links.
But Naymz doesn’t stop at organic optimization. The company buys a paid listing on Google using the member’s name as a keyword and directs the ad to the profile page at www.naymz.com. (That’s assuming the name is not too common. Members named “Bob Smith” or something equally popular get an aggregated landing page that points visitors to all Naymz’s Bob Smith profiles.)
“When we launched in March, we weren’t giving that Google paid listing away for free,” says Drugan. “But it’s hard to get people to pay for stuff on the Internet, so we decided to open it up. It also helps market us, because you might be searching for someone else, see one of our sponsored links, and try the service.”
The Google sponsored listing also serves to differentiate Naymz.com from one of its competitors, ClaimID, which offers an optimized profile for organic search but doesn’t use paid ads. That need to wait for search bots to spider a profile page means ClaimID usually can’t get a profile into search results as quickly as Naymz can, Drugan says.
Naymz.com hopes to make its money by upselling users to a premium service. A $4.95 monthly subscription, with the first month offered free, gets you a paid listing not only on Google but on Yahoo!, MSN, MySpace, and a number of other sites, including CNN and the popular Technorati blog. Premium members also get deeper-level reporting about the searchers who have entered their names as search queries.
Right now, Drugan says, the service has “a few thousand” users, mostly the tech-forward online types who are also creating blogs and taking part in the social network sites. “But we’re trying to get more into the consumer space and appeal to people who rely on their names for their brands—doctors, dentists, real estate agents, insurance agents,” Drugan says.
Shortly after the launch, Naymz.com was approached by GMAC Real Estate to build a white-label version of its service specifically for that 22,000-member nationwide realtor service. Agents can build their profile, link it to any other business-specific content they may have up on the Web, and get found high up in either natural or paid results when searchers go looking for their name.
It was the first company-wide Web profile creation program for GMAC Real Estate, and it may point Naymz in a new direction as a provider of private-label SEM services to trade organizations. Drugan says the company is now talking to other professional groups in the dental and real estate fields.
“That could turn out to be our biggest opportunity,” he says. “We’re also talking to Legacy.com, which is the biggest online obituary site, about partnering with them to get prime placement for their profiles.”
Next up for Naymz.com is a feature that will crawl the Web and the blogosphere looking for mentions of members’ names. Tentatively called Reputation Monitor and planned for rollout in the near future, it’s sort of the flip side of what Naymz does now. Rather than proactively setting out what a member wants the world to see, the new service will keep an eye on what is actually being made available about you over the general Web and alert you via e-mail when it discovers something you ought to see.