Take Control of Your Name Part II - YOU WILL BE SPOCKED
by KenSoon online name and reputation management may see yet another twist as more and more startups are creating people search engines. Matt recently wrote a post about online name management and Joel at the Future of Real Estate Marketing reposted an original article from last year to kick start another discussion about managing YOU online. This week at the Web 2.0 EXPO, SPOCK debuted with a new service that allows people to search for people. They claim that they already have 100 million people indexed in their database and over 2 billion elements collected about YOU - SCARY!
ZDNET , Techcrunch , Webware , and Tim O'Reilly have already covered what SPOCK may be doing in great detail, but I'm interested in the basic business concept as it is a concept that is very similar to what Zillow has done for homes. They are capitalizing on a very basic and natural human behaviour - CURIOUSITY. Zillow has successfully shown that this curiosity factor is one significant element in driving traffic.
What Zillow and SPOCK have in common:
1. Large database of information - Zillow collected data on more than 60 million homes at launch. SPOCK has collected data on 100 million people.
2. SPOCK raised $7 million even before having an alpha version. Of course Zillow already was self-funded in the millions initially by its founders before developing the product.
3. Zillow allows you to claim your home to make valuation adjustments or claim your listing to let others know it is for sale. SPOCK allows you to claim "YOU".
4. Plays on the curiosity factor - how much is your boss's home worth ? Zillow it! Who is that new neighbor next door ? SPOCK them!
My guess is whether or not SPOCK will be successful in helping or hindering online reputation management, it will be successful in drawing lots of eyeballs. Be careful - YOU WILL BE SPOCKED!
Tags:Realivent UpdatesPopularity: 7% [?]
Whatever happened to making a community the hard way, from the ground up…meeting, and mingling…now it seems like all communities are started by spiders gathering all your information and then you have to take control of your image.
April 19th, 2007 at 9:17 amI got an email flyer this past week from a company selling
yourname.com websites. For x amount of dollars they will build a
website for you and promise to have you rank at the top of
all search engines for your own name.
Scary. Why bother working? Just pay a measly x dollars and someone
will turn you into somebody… On the internet at least.
I can see it now; I hope we don’t have too many John Doe’s vying
April 19th, 2007 at 8:18 pmfor 1st place.
I wasn’t able to get on spock without an invitation. But, I agree that it has very similar characteristics (at least from the sample screenshots) to zillow. Gather detailed information and then reward those that keep an eye on the site to make sure the information is correct.
We have to spend some time each month on Wikipedia for the same reason.
April 20th, 2007 at 4:00 am[…] Here's the main message of the ad - "and your neighbors too". Coldwell Banker is the latest to use the Curiosity Factor as a driving force to attract more online homebuyers and sellers to their site and joins the forces of Cyberhomes, Zillow, Real Estate ABC, HouseFront, and Property Shark to offer some variation of automated valuation services for anyone to freely use. […]
June 14th, 2007 at 9:03 pm