Post 2/3: Building your Reference Network

As I wrote at the end of my last post, your professional references are an asset not only in any job search but, most of all, in your career as a whole.

I hope that this post will help you become aware of the need for and usefulness of taking your disparate references and turning them into a true network: a Reference Network.

A Reference Network is very different from a Contacts Network. That’s why it’s important that you build 2 networks:

1. Your Contacts Network

These are the people in your Rolodex: all the persons with whom you’ve made contact at least once, either in person or virtually. This network will allow you to retrieve your references and be connected with the right people to find a job, clients, experts or partners.

2. Your Reference Network

This is your network of social and professional references, what we might also call your Trust Network. This network will help to boost your career within your current company, but will also prove helpful in any future job search.

Understanding the concept of a Contacts Network is easy; however, the concept of a Trust Network encompassing your references isn’t as obvious!

I. What is a Reference Network?

In life, we live and work with many people and we build trust relations with them. Our mobility (city, country, job changes….) requires that our network be rebuilt on a regular basis. Each time we meet a new person, a neighbor, a colleague or a new manager, we start from scratch with trust-building. It will take several months or years to recreate these trust links. Today, our trust relations are “intangible” since they can not be measured. They are invisible since the people who trust you are actually the only ones who know they trust you. So, it’s necessary to externalize and make visible your trust relations with people around you.

Today, the effectiveness of social networking is a proven fact. Each one of us belongs to a number of different social networks - through family, friends, school, extra curricular activities or work. But there is one network which is much more significant than the others - your Reference Network! Your Reference Network encompasses all of your networks and gathers all your social and professional references together. This network is informal and invisible but it exists! So, it’s necessary to make your Reference Network visible through recommendations and tags. It allows you to promote your Reference Network among the very people you need to further enhance your professional life (prospects, recruiters, managers, etc).

Anyone you have contact with can potentially be part of your Reference Network. It can be your managers, employees, colleagues, partners, customers, or suppliers. Recent graduates may want to include former teachers and other social references such as friends, non-profit organizations, or blog readers.

Your social references are made up of all persons from your social and professional life who can emphasize your strong points, your values or your expertise in social situations. Highlighting your skills will provide significant added value to your career. Your social references show assets that people may not have noticed in your professional career. Examples are: your creativity, your hidden expertise, your special skills, your leadership in a sports team, your artistic talents, etc. These elements are not always emphasized or they get lost at the very bottom of your CV (in “Miscellaneous”). It’s time to give them room to shine! Do you regret a path taken and want to find a way out? Use your Social Reference Network to help you out.

II. Who can belong to my Reference Network?

Take a look at your résumé to identify those persons who can belong to your Reference Network.

- For each position within your company, identify all the people who could potentially belong to your network: your managers, associates, colleagues, clients, suppliers or partners.

- For every one of your extra-professional activities, within a club or association for example, identify all the people who can contribute a relevant perspective about your skills or personal qualities, as well as shed light on the way you have performed your duties (in particular within a club or association).

Have you lost track of your references? It’s easy to connect with people who still work with you, but what about those who no longer do? You’re applying with a new company for a position which you’ve held in the past but, you’re finding it impossible to contact your former manager whose recommendation could clinch it for you. Your current manager can’t provide an evaluation of your performance in this type of position. You’re stuck.

Are you one of these professionals who lose their references over time? If this is the case, now’s the time to take action!

Here are some possible search options to help you retrieve your references:

- Search engines or directories targeted at finding people: CV 2.0, Spock, Ziki, Ziggs, Zoominfo, Wink, Yoname or Naymz.

- Social networks: Facebook, Copainsdavant, Viadeo, Linkedin, 6nergies, Tribe or Ecademy

- White pages in normal phone books, even though these are not very efficient if you don’t at least know the current city in which the person lives.

- General search engines such as Google: type in, in quotes, the « first name last name » of the person you seek. If this search yields too many results, try adding distinctive elements to your query: university, company,… To find their email address, type in « first name last name mail » or « first name last name @ » (this will limit search results to pages which feature e-mail addresses).

In theory, your whole professional circle could belong to your Reference Network. However, you don’t trust everyone indiscriminately and the reverse holds true as well. That’s why you need to define a sphere of trust!

III. Knowing how to define a sphere of trust

To quote an excerpt from an earlier post on our digital lives: You can trust someone to do certain things but not others. A Formula 1 driver is a priori someone you can trust to drive a race car. But would you ask him to build your house? The trust you place in a person isn’t absolute; it is context-specific. With each person in your reference network, you must define a “context of trust” (a “sphere of trust”) with respect to roles, abilities or personal qualities. You can not say you trust someone without specifying the context in which you trust them.

For example, here is how Jack could define his context of trust with respect to his colleague Martin (defining what is inside and what is outside the sphere of trust):

-> Jack trusts Martin when it comes to managing a team, marketing and creativity (roles, abilities and personal qualities within Jack’s sphere of trust regarding Martin)

-> Jack doesn’t know whether he can trust Martin when it comes to managing a project, maintaining computer systems or when it comes to his loyalty towards the company (outside Jack’s sphere of trust)

-> Jack doesn’t trust Martin when it comes to managing innovation, accounting or when it comes to his punctuality (outside Jack’s sphere of trust)

In summary:

My Reference Network or Trust Network = People I trust and people who trust me (mutual trust).

With each person within your reference network, you define a sphere of trust. This sphere of trust can include roles, areas of expertise, abilities and personal qualities. These elements serve as the basis for the trust you place in a person within your network. They will be described through recommendations of your references, either verbally (during interviews with recruiters) or in writing (letters of recommendation). Inversely, outside the sphere of trust, you’re not comfortable saying you trust this person.

You can find numerous tools on the internet to help you build your networks (both contacts and reference networks). The internet is itself a network of networks, and social networks are a natural outgrowth of these. In the next post, we will take a look at general (Linkedin, Viadeo, Ecademy…) and specialized tools for managing your references and recommendations (CV 2.0, Repvine, Naymz,…). Tune in next time!

Freelancers have at their disposal a number of sites they can use to connect with potential clients. For example on Odesk, a website dedicated to computer specialists, each project is evaluated with a gold-star system (ranging from 1 to 5) along several dimensions. This facilitates the evaluation of freelancers’ reputation.

However, besides these particular cases, how can a professional’s reputation be evaluated?

It is customary for recruiters and employers to evaluate the reputation of a professional based on his references and his recommendations (either written, in the form of a letter of recommendation, or oral).

After an interview, these 2 elements enable a recruiter to validate his impression of the candidate and to further explore certain aspects of the candidate’s career path and personality. In this respect, they provide invaluable insights into the candidate’s reputation.

As a professional, it is therefore crucial to actively and effectively manage your references throughout your career, and not solely when looking for employment. The goal is to build a durable professional reputation.

I. Who are your references?

In most countries the emphasis is put on professional references; but in some countries, however, social references will also be of interest.

Depending on the position you seek, you can choose your professional references from among your former managers, colleagues, associates, clients, suppliers or partners. If you’re just starting out in your professional career, or if you’re a student, you can reach out to your former professors.

If you present social references, you can choose friends or people from your social or community-based network, but obviously not family members (zero credibility!). One should take note, however, that for particular recruiters, references from friends, neighbors or parents, carry no weight, no matter the country.

The time to build one’s network is when everything is running smoothly. It will be a little late to do so when everything’s already gone to pot. In general, if you remain in your corner, help will not be there for you on the day when something goes wrong. The same principle applies for your references. It is better to think about capitalizing on your references when everything’s going well rather than wait to be in the unemployment line. Do you know the difference between a winner and a loser? A loser has a plan in case something goes well; a winner a plan in case something goes wrong. Once unemployed, in a couple of months you could lose touch with your former colleagues.

Being fired is not the only thing that can destroy your career. So can office gossip. It is therefore crucial to seek the kind of references that will highlight your professional qualities and your skills, and defend your reputation if necessary, any time it’s feasible.

To summarize, your references are all the people in your professional and social circles who might become part of your network of references. This network will help show that you are trustworthy and defend your reputation. In the next post, we will deal with the particulars of how to go about building and managing one’s network of references (or trust network).

II. How do recruiters carry out their work?

For a recruiter, to call references is to try to get an insight into the candidate’s actions as seen by others (this is the so-called 360° feedback).

A. How does the recruiter select your references?

In general, a recruiter will ask a candidate to provide him with three references, two former managers and a person of the candidate’s choosing for example (the candidate will have to justify his choice).

Depending on the profiles and the job opening, the recruiter will try to obtain information from different people who have known the candidate at various points along his career path, in different roles and positions. The goal is to gather information from different echelons of the workplace hierarchy: superiors, colleagues, associates, suppliers and clients.

Recruiters often prioritize the views of former managers because a priori they are in the best position to judge their subordinates’ abilities and to notice up-and-comers. The views and opinions of colleagues and clients are less relevant because they lack an overall picture.

In general, the recruiter will seek to:

1 - Validate the candidate’s previous performance: results achieved, pattern of available-resource utilization (optimal or not), strategic vision, skill set, expertise, etc… This is to verify that the opening is suitable for the candidate and that he will be able to handle the job’s evolving requirements.

2 - Evaluate the candidate’s personality: reliability, responsiveness, effectiveness, people skills, ethics, ambition, potential, autonomy, creativity, thoroughness, adaptability, ability to work in a team, head for business, etc…

B. How does the conversation between the recruiter and the person providing the reference unfold?

The recruiter contacts the person providing the reference, most often by phone.

1. The recruiter wants to make sure that your reference (the person he’s talking to) is reliable. As the conversation proceeds, the recruiter will gauge the way they answer his questions, their understanding of the subject, their spontaneity, their silences and above all, the quality of the information they provide. The goal is to determine if your reference is sincere or if they’re withholding something. The recruiter thus checks the sincerity of the words spoken.
In the event that the information provided by different people does not match, the recruiter will dig deeper.

2. The conversation often begins by going over the particulars of the working relationship between the reference and the candidate: the circumstances, the respective posts held at the time, the kinds of projects undertaken, the length and frequency of interaction during the working relationship.

The classic questions focus on:

- Strong Points – Weaknesses or Qualities – Faults
- Successes – Failures
- Behavior in a team, behavior with clients
- Management style
- Reaction under stress

But questions such as the following are also common:
- If you had to give advice to person X to help them develop their skills or improve in general, what would that advice be?
- What advice would you give to their future boss about the best way to fully utilize the talent and potential of said person X?
- Is it your impression that person X has what it takes to keep moving forward in his career?
- If I were to speak to your colleagues regarding person X, would they tell me the same things you did about this person? Who would differ and why?
- (After describing the job for which person X has applied) In your opinion, would person X make a good candidate? Are there aspects that would need monitoring, improvement?
And finally the typical question: Would you be willing to rehire them? The false notes, the tone of voice, the hesitations are all taken into account!

3. Certain recruiters have specialized firms perform background checks on candidates: university degrees, debts or criminal files. See for example : Info Cubic

To summarize, here are the key points:
- Has the candidate been truthful?
- Does the information gathered from different references match?
- Does the information gathered from the references confirm the impression formed during the conversations?

In this way, recruiters validate that they were not taken in by the candidate during the interview. Manipulative persons abound! This is necessary since they are putting their credibility and reputation on the line with regards to future employers.

III. How to prepare yourself

It is important to anticipate recruiters’ request for references even if you’re not currently looking for work (see: the difference between a loser and a winner!). You would therefore be well advised to make a list, right now, of all the people who might contribute a relevant perspective about your profile (more practical details on this in the next post).

If you’re currently looking for work, you can have your reference read this post in preparation of the coming conversation with recruiters! The goal should be to allow them to give answers with precision and authenticity.

If you know that one of your references will give negative feedback on certain aspects of your shared working relationship, it is better to preempt them by giving your version of the facts. In general, the more open you are with the recruiter, the more he will trust you.

It’s also possible that your reference will not be very positive in their assessment of you because they resent your leaving the organization. They can pay you back indirectly! It is thus helpful to describe for the recruiter the context of your departure.

If you lie on a single aspect of your resume, you undermine the credibility of the whole document. A lot of resumes are faked; candidates lie and so do their references. This is part of the way things are. This is not an effective way, however, to build one’s reputation for the long-term! Thanks to people search engines, Google, social networks and tools designed for the management of online reputation, the Internet will soon make it a lot easier to track fraudsters. If you’re among them, now is the time to act…

IV. Your references: an asset for tomorrow, today and always!

A lot of professionals face 2 major problems when it comes to their references: losing them and using them in crisis mode (when everything’s going wrong).

How do we lose our references?

References are at the core of your professional reputation. The more of them you have, the better. However, you regularly lose these references: loss of contact information, retirement,…

The rate at which you lose your references is commensurate with:
- your professional mobility (change of organization, roles,…)
- your geographical mobility (change of country, region,…)

How to best take advantage of your references starting now

Why call upon your references only when you’re seeking a job? Your references could help you get a promotion, a raise or even a new position!

Your references are at the core of what could be called your trust network. What are you doing to manage your trust network? Not much? Then you’ll definitely want to read the next post

This post benefited from contributions from the following: Guy Djandji - Béatrice Sevat (CRM Web Manager, DANONE group) - Alexandra Thusy - Jean-Michel Putto (president of GN, a consulting firm specializing in strategic development) – Valentine Baud & Florent Lafarge

In the preceding post, we listed a certain number of services offering a way to evaluate reputation by means of a score (Read that post here).

The lesson from this post is that, while Google may be the leader in evaluating reputation by means of references, eBay is the clear leader in evaluating reputation by means of a score. But eBay presents a major problem; its system is a closed one. You can’t easily promote the reputation you’ve earned on eBay’s system outside of it. That eBay wouldn’t want its evaluation system to be used by competing e-Commerce sites is understandable since this would remove its differentiating factor and eat away at its sales. In any event, if it were advantageous for them to open their system, they would have already done so.

Numerous services have therefore been created to address this problem. These services have set up “open” evaluation systems, meaning that they’re not connected to the e-Commerce site hosting the current transaction. Notable among these services are iKarma, Rapleaf, TrustPlus and Gorb (Opinity has shut its doors). These last have copied eBay’s system and improved upon it in their own way, making theirs more user-friendly and universal (in terms of the reach of the evaluation) systems.

As an e-Commerce site, eBay can only provide an evaluation of you as a seller or a buyer. These new services, however, don’t sell anything except an evaluation of your reputation. To broaden their client base, they have thus applied the methods used to evaluate transactions to the evaluation of people, content or relationships.

Yet, the relevance of an evaluation by scoring is inversely proportional to how much the evaluator and the person being evaluated know about each other.

In other words, the more we know people, the less relevant an evaluation by scoring becomes because the relationship between the evaluator and the person being evaluated carries “more weight.” More weight in terms of sub-text and shared history of ups and downs. This means that friendship, love and the return of favors will push any score higher (oftentimes way above what it should be). Conversely, settling of scores and grudges will push any score lower (oftentimes way below what it should be).

I. How the level of acquaintanceship impacts the evaluation of reputation

Here are the 5 levels of acquaintanceship:

• Level 1: We don’t know each other (strangers).
• Level 2: I know of him/her but he/she doesn’t know me (name recognition).
• Level 3: Our paths have crossed (acquaintances – enough interactions to gather a first impression).
• Level 4: Close relationship (friends, colleagues – regular, long-term interactions several times a month for at least a couple of years).
• Level 5: Very close relationship (family, very close friends – daily, very long-term interaction).

The evaluation by scoring is relevant for levels 1 through 3: weak or non-existent level of acquaintanceship. At these levels, the evaluator will judge the facts: “He delivered what I ordered in the agreed-upon timeframe,” “I’ve been paid,”…

At levels 4 and 5, the history of the relationship will start to weigh on the mind of the evaluator. Subjectivity (opinions, value judgments) will start to supersede objectivity (observable and quantifiable facts). At these levels, the chance of over-valuing (“he’s the best”) or under-valuing (“he’s lousy”) the other person becomes more likely.

On eBay, the level of acquaintanceship between users hovers somewhere between 1 and 2. In addition, it’s not possible to evaluate a person in the absence of a transaction. In fact, it’s the transaction that’s evaluated, not the person. Thus, a new evaluation is required for each new transaction between the same people. Indeed, it’s quite possible for a seller to perform efficiently during one transaction and fall short on another.

Conversely, on the new services such as iKarma, you’ll see that most evaluators share a level 4 acquaintanceship with the person evaluated, a fact which can be ascertained by visiting user profiles. While your best friends and colleagues may visit your profile, so may your worst enemies. Since no particular transaction is required, it’s up to each party to decide which criteria to use to evaluate the other. You may be evaluated on the basis of one act or several, one single day or several years, one transaction or a mix of several kinds of actions (transaction, relationship and content publishing).

On eBay, the relationship’s context is crystal clear. You’re either a buyer or a seller! On other services, however, there often lacks a field to specify the relationship’s context. Some users provide this information of their own accord in their feedback and some don’t. This context is helpful in determining the potential for over- or under- valuation.

II. The operating principles of eBay’s competitors

An analysis of the evaluation methods and communications of eBay’s competitors reveals that they operate on 2 basic principles.

1st Principle: Since no one’s perfect, neutral or negative ratings have to be allowed.

The goal is to create an evaluation of the person and/or their acts that comes as close to reality as possible. When a person behaves badly, it’s to be expected that this should be shared. In fact, this is what underpins eBay’s system. A small measure of discretion, however, is in order. Indeed, studies of eBay’s system have shown the limitations of neutral or negative feedback. If you give a negative rating, you expose yourself to in-kind retaliation from the other party. As a result, the system can sometimes get mired in an implicit understanding of non-aggression (i.e. mutually assured destruction). There have been instances where some buyers have even gone so far as to threaten sellers to try to get more than what was agreed upon: “If you don’t give me more, I’ll give you a negative rating”. A credible threat given that a seller’s reputation is his working capital!

More importantly still is the fact that while some criticisms may be well-founded, others may be fabricated; some may be fair and others unfair; some may rely on readily observable and quantifiable facts and others on prejudices, opinions or value judgments.

Linkedin is the most often cited example of why this principle is needed. If you take a look on that service at the recommendations on users’ profiles, you’ll see that the content of these is always positive and sometimes even panegyric. Given that a user may refuse a recommendation, this leads to a situation where de facto only positive feedback is allowed. It’s not true, however, that feedback is necessarily false just because it is positive. Conversely, it’s just as likely that neutral or negative feedback may be false.

In addition, if we consider the recruiter’s concerns, her decision whether to recruit someone is based on the skills that person possesses, and not on those which they have yet to master. User testimonies work on the same principle. While they do not give any indications about a person’s missing skills, they do validate part of this person’s skill set. As such, Linkedin’s system is imperfect, in the sense that a recruiter still has some legwork to do. The candidate and his references must still be interviewed in order to validate the skills not mentioned in any recommendations. The recruiter no longer needs, however, to validate the candidate’s full skill set. Regardless, this is an improvement on the current system.

It’s also important to realize that the person making the recommendation is putting his or her reputation on the line. You will be destroying your own reputation if you write that such and such is a computer genius, when in fact the person has a marginal grasp of IT. It follows that the value of a recommendation is tied to the reputation of the recommender; the higher the reputation the greater the value of the recommendation, and vice-versa.

Similarly, the more recommendations you garner the more likely it is, statistically speaking, that you already have a good reputation. It’s the same principle as Google’s PageRank. The more people recommend a site, the more they contribute to its credibility and good reputation.

Finally, giving negative feedback may lead to a form of vigilantism. On the Internet as anywhere else, laws defining the balance of rights between the accuser and the accused must be respected. The Internet must not become a lawless place where private disputes are settled in public through acts of vigilantism (libel) or where the lure of a positive rating is used to shake down merchants (see the example above).

From opinion to libel: While the laws concerning libel differ from country to country, in most of them, you leave yourself open to lawsuits and to adverse legal judgments if you leave a negative comment that’s liable to be interpreted as libelous.

2nd Principle: Anonymous ratings and comments have to be allowed in order to let people say what they truly think.

How can we believe an underling’s glowing feedback about his manager when this same manager is responsible for allocating year-end bonuses and promotions? Who will openly complain about their clients’ late payments?

Thus, anonymity would appear to be THE solution for venting, sight unseen, about one’s manager or clients with the full freedom of expression required.

However, who will want to promote their reputation on a service where just about anyone might publicly vilify them? Strangely enough, when you visit sites that allow anonymous posting, you immediately notice that on average 98% of feedback is positive. Weird, isn’t it? It’s not so weird if you take into account the fact that people with negative scores have closed their accounts and numerous others never even opened one for fear of negative feedback. Under such circumstances, the system of anonymous posting doesn’t meet its disclosure goals.

To counter user flight, some services such as Rapleaf have resorted to creating profiles, without asking for anyone’s approval, from email addresses harvested from the Internet. However, nothing is more easily changed than an email address (we already do so to escape from spam). In case this isn’t enough, we can have a “clean-up” service dispatch their lawyers to have the offending content removed. Either the content will be taken down or the offending service will have to lay out a great deal of money to pay for legal costs.

In summary, unless a certain number of conditions are respected, anonymity and neutral or negative ratings produce pernicious effects.

III. The conditions necessary for a successful system of evaluation by scoring

Analyzing eBay’s system allows us to define the conditions necessary for a successful system of evaluation by scoring. Neutral or negative ratings and comments are socially acceptable provided that:

-> the evaluation focuses on objective, factual, observable and quantifiable elements. This is the case for commercial transactions.

-> the evaluation takes place between people who share an acquaintanceship level between 1 and 3.

-> the numerical score is accompanied by a qualitative comment which provides a broader context for the score. “If I’ve made a mistake, I’d like to know what it is so that I may improve”.

-> the stakes of the evaluation be low (evaluation of a person’s one-time action) and not high (general, long-term evaluation of the person as a whole). Therefore, the evaluation must focus on a person’s DOINGS and not on their BEING. “Mr Smith MADE a mistake” is a temporary state of affairs which affords him the opportunity to improve, to do better next time. “Mr Johnson is lousy” is categorical and gives him the STATUS of being lousy.

-> I have more to lose than to gain by leaving the service if I receive a negative rating, either because the service provides other benefits (e.g. eBay is the leader in its market segment) or because there are no alternatives.

-> I can verify the identity of the evaluator (not necessarily his digital id card, but at least his pseudonym’s bona fides). If you’re a seller, you accept the negative rating from a buyer to whom you made a late delivery because you recognize him. But never would you accept a neutral or negative rating from somebody whom you weren’t even sure you’d done business with. This would come across as a clear injustice. We all have a touch of paranoïa in us so we don’t need the Internet to feed it! The reasoning behind anonymous scoring is unimpeachable (freeing speech) and yet it makes no sense in terms of fairness and social acceptance.

In conclusion, eBay is a great success mainly due to its reputation evaluation system which was designed for and implemented within a specific context. A few brave entrepreneurs have attempted to outdo eBay. In the attempt, they’ve taken eBay’s methodology out of its ecosystem, namely: only evaluating actions, evaluating each action and evaluating simple actions (buying or selling).

eBay’s competitors should therefore refocus their evaluations on the actions of people and not on the people themselves. The evaluator should identify him- or her- self and be made to address specific elements of the action under review, as is the case with eBay.

eBay, however, is not THE universal solution for managing reputation. eBay’s clones are even less likely contenders for that title. Here are the main reasons why:

• Reputation is not evaluated the same way depending on whether you’re dealing with people’s actions (transaction, content, relationship), the people themselves, organizations, objects or services. The evaluation of reputation depends on the subject of the evaluation (Read this post for more on evaluation methods)
• Being a good seller or a good buyer does not necessarily mean being a good professional, and vice versa. Reputation is tied to a “context of trust” or a “sphere of trust” (Read this post for more details - See part V – feature 1)

With the advent of Web 2.0, software has started to integrate social components and, as such, it can no longer be content with being a combination of marketing and programming, with a dash of AJAX thrown in. It opens the way for the invention of new social relationships. I hope that this post will have shown that what is technically feasible or financially profitable is not necessarily socially acceptable or useful.

This post offers a way to classify the tools available to manage your reputation on the Internet. The following analysis deals with any and all services that, as a core or subsidiary offering, either directly or indirectly, provide a system for evaluating reputation. Services that enable you to promote your reputation will be dealt with in another post since this involves a different dynamic (communication). Incidentally, communicating about your reputation is as essential as building it in the first place! Once you’ve succeeded in creating your digital reputation, it will become necessary to enhance its visibility and to promote it.

The goal of this post and of the following posts is to enable you to:
- understand the inner workings of each service,
- compare them with the help of relevant criteria and,
- develop a global understanding of all the services offered to help you make an informed decision.

The follow-up posts will therefore deal with:
1. How certain services can destroy your reputation, even though they are supposed to help you build it (For more on this, read the next post eBay, a universal system for evaluating reputation?)
2. A broad overview of the tools of reputation management accompanied by a summary of each service,
3. From most popular to least, a description of each service. The format of these descriptions will be as follows: subject of the evaluation, method of the evaluation, description, feature set, critical analysis (strong points & potential areas of improvement) and finally service continuity. For example, Opinity has already shut its doors, the year-long “48-hour service interruption” notice notwithstanding!

I. What are the methods of evaluation?

Here is a quick reminder of the definition of reputation (Read this entire post for more information): “The trust that your close ones place in you can be measured by what is called “reputation”, a word whose root stems from the Latin “reputatio”, meaning “evaluation”. Reputation is thus a social evaluation, or more simply put, it is the opinion of one or more people about another person. An opinion is a value judgement and as such it has a subjective dimension. Sometimes, it rests on observable and incontrovertible facts; other times, on rumors, prejudices, even wholecloth fabrications aimed at destroying a rival.”

In general, reputation management services offer 2 methods of evaluation: by means of a score or through references. On a different note, the services whose business centers around evaluating a person’s or an organization’s reputation use various computing and legal techniques. These can be summarized as: looking for evidence of your digital life, analyzing this evidence and, in the case of certain services, removing any evidence that could offend.

A. Evaluation by scoring

This approach relies on mostly quantitative criteria for its evaluation. Most services, however, allow you to leave a comment and/or tags to give the evaluation a broader context.

Here are some examples of scoring methods:

-> Click on each image for a bigger version

- eBay uses positive, neutral or negative ratings but also offers a more detailed evaluation of the seller (see the right part of the image)

- iKarma works along the same lines (take a look at the CEO’s profile for an example)

- Rapleaf also uses this system (take a look at the CEO’s profile for an example)

- TrustPlus uses custom symbols

- Gorb offers scales from 1 to 10 to rate both personal conduct and professional performance

- Venyo offers a scale from 1 to 5 (mainly to evaluate a blog’s content)

- Jobvent offers very specific criteria for the evaluation of your current company (model of an evaluation for Ford)

- Criticat does as well (model of an evaluation for Google)

- Amazon offers a gold star system: with one star being bad and 5 stars excellent

- Other services that also use this approach: Odesk, Elance, PriceMinister, Opinity, Shopping.com, RateItAll, ePinions, TripAdvisor, TravelPost, U.lik, CrowdStorm, Squidoo.

B. Evaluation by references or recommendations

This approach relies on mostly qualitative criteria for its evaluation (written text in the form of feedback, recommendations, comments…). It does, however, also use quantitative criteria (number of recommendations, number of readers, popularity,…).

Here are some examples:

- Recommendations: Linkedin, Viadeo, 6nergies, Ecademy, Spock and Tribe.

- References (a reference is a person who trusts you and is willing to vouch for your reputation) : CV 2.0, Repvine and Naymz.

- Popularity:

1. As reflected by the number of people who link back to some content from within their own: Google, Technorati

2. As reflected by the number of people who recommend reading some content or using some product or service: Digg, Wikio, Zlio, Alenty, Newsvine, del.icio.us, Fuzz, TapeMoi, Scoupeo, Nuouz, Agoravox.

3. As reflected by the number of readers: Feedburner, FeedBlitz, Zookoda

II. The subject of the evaluation

The evaluation can focus on:

1. An object (books, DVD, games, video camera,…) or a service (trips, hotel,…)

2. A person (from a personal and/or professional standpoint, on their roles, abilities, areas of expertise or personal qualities)

3. The actions of a person:

a. producing written, video or audio content on a site (in particular blogs),
b. making a transaction or exchanging goods or services (selling, buying, swapping,…)
c. having a relationship (friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues,…) or interacting with another person (discussions, dating, online games,…).

4. An organization (see services such as Jobvent or Criticat which enable an organization’s stakeholders to give their opinion about it - private company, association, bureaucracy,…)

5. A reputation (see services which analyze your reputation using the following method: research, analysis and sanitizing).

III. The specific approach of reputation evaluation services

Services whose business centers around evaluating your reputation use various techniques. Generally speaking, they search the Internet for all the evidence of your digital life and any evidence left by others regarding you . They then deliver back indicators that enable you to take stock of your digital reputation and, from then on, follow its evolution.

As an organization, it is possible to evaluate the reputation you have among your employees, clients, suppliers, and stakeholders in general (NGO, shareholders,…)

Finally, certain services offer you the possibility to sanitize your reputation by removing any offending evidence. Aside from legal filings, there are simple techniques, such as asking Google to remove content from its index.

Here is a list of services which we will later discuss in greater detail: Online Reputation Monitor, iGooq (Filteris), Biz360, BrandPulse (Nielsen BuzzMetrics), BuzzLogic, ReputationDefender, ReputationManager, Quova, iFeed Enterprise, Reputation Defender, Distilled.

The number of companies involved in this market space clearly indicates the magnitude of the stakes of digital reputation management, for individuals as well as for private companies! ReputationDefender even offers to defend the reputation of your children… You can’t stop progress

IV. Summary table

The table below breaks down all the services by method of evaluation and by subject of evaluation.

-> Download the table in Word format

Certain services appear in several table cells because they enable multiple evaluations, in particular for the actions of a person.

As with any table, the goal is to highlight trends and give reference points. One can always argue that this or that service doesn’t belong in a particular column or a particular row, that there is a need for a new column or a new row. I invite you to discuss these permutations in the comments section!

The list of tools is probably incomplete. I would be grateful if you would bring any missing services to my attention either in the comments section or by contacting me through the following link: http://www.axiopole.com/en/contact.php . I will promptly update this list and credit you as a contributor at the end of the post.

This post was inspired by, and I would like to thank, the following:
Techcrunch & Fred Cavazza who enabled me to complete my list of services.

By opening up a brand new space, the Internet allows us to sometimes lead another life, one very different from our day to day existence, a digital life! We create this digital life every time we use the many Internet services available to us, services which may not have any real-world counterpart. Here are some examples of the actions we can perform, and interactions we can engage in, thanks to the internet:

- Content publishing: blogs, podcasts, vidcasts, citizen journalism (NowPublic, OhMyNews, Agoravox,…), collaborative encyclopedias (Wikipedia), platforms for collaborative FAQ’s (Yahoo! Answers, Google Answers) ;

- Content sharing: photos (FlickR), videos (YouTube, Dailymotion…), music or links (del.icio.us) ;

- Publishing of reviews about products, services, performance (TripAdvisor, Epinions, …) ;

- Social networking: centered on a particular theme (motorcycles, cooking, games,…) ; for professionals (LinkedIn, Ryze, Ecademy, Viadeo, Xing…) ; for everyone (MySpace, Facebook, Orkut,…) ;

- Online purchasing through sites such as Amazon or eBay with payment systems such as Paypal ;

- Job searching (Monster, Stepstone,…), online posting of résumés (eMurse) ;

- Dating sites (eHarmony, Match, Meetic…) ;

- Online gaming sites (World of Warcraft, Everquest,…) or virtual universes (SecondLife, There, Habbo Hotel,…).

Everytime we use these different services, we each leave behind a « trail ». Certain aspects of this trail, such as when we give our opinion of a Mexican Hotel through TripAdvisor, are neutral or innocuous. Other aspects, however, can have a tremendous impact on our life (our non-digital life!), not only in terms of identity but of reputation as well.
This impact can be positive: increased recognition (more people come to know your identity) or positive reinforcement of your reputation (communication of information likely to benefit you reputation).
This impact can also be negative: identity theft (an impersonator may misuse your financial accounts by using your own identifying data) or destruction of your reputation (rivals may resort to slander and defamation for example,…).

II. Your digital life is neither more nor less dangerous than your real life!

Faced with the dangers of identity theft, we could choose to no longer share identifying information over the Internet. But this would deprive us of the use of many, very helpful services. On real-world highways, we follow the rules of the road in order to avoid accidents. Similarly, we should follow safe-surfing rules to navigate securely the Net’s information highways. Unfortunately, most people remain unaware of these rules. An upcoming blog post will feature some of these rules. Leaving your identifying information on the Internet is no more dangerous than getting into your car, provided that you know how to drive! Besides, there are tools and techniques to help us protect our most sensitive personal data. We will discuss those again on this blog.

Faced with the risks of leaving a trail that may harm your reputation, you could choose to publish absolutely nothing or only do so anonymously. Unless you are retired, enjoying the benefits of lifetime-guaranteed employment (bureaucrats,…) or working in a field where your reputation is not at stake, you would be making a mistake. The worst that can happen to you is not that you leave behind a trail that may harm your digital reputation. The worst would be leaving no trail at all, meaning not having any digital reputation. 77% of recruiters go online to research potential hires. 7% of all queries handled by search engines deal with a person’s name.

Not having a digital reputation could be interpreted in the following ways as:

- A lack of transparency
- A refusal to share information
- Someone without anything to say
- A technophobe
- Risk averse

Having a digital reputation means being transparent, showing your ability to share information, expressing ideas or opinions, using the information technologies that are core competencies of today’s companies and organizations, and using your capacity for risk taking or your own initiative.

The day is fast approaching when the choice between two candidates will come down to how easily their reputation can be evaluated, with the losing party having the more difficult one to evaluate. This blog will present numerous tools and methods to help you manage your digital reputation by showcasing the positive aspects of your digital life.

III. Digital life Vs Digital identity Vs Digital reputation

Our digital life impacts our identity and our reputation. If you surf around the blogosphere, however, you’ll see that digital reputation is often associated with digital identity and vice versa. Take for example Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip Identity, who explained during a 2005 conference that “identity=reputation”. Yet, a cat is not a dog even if both are animals. Mars is not Jupiter even if both are planets. Identity can not be equated with reputation even if both are dimensions of our digital lives. The dictionary defines identity as: “The set of legally recognized or recorded attributes by which a person is known” which is altogether different from the definition of reputation. Digital identity experts (much like many of their fellow experts for that matter!) have the tendency to view the world through the lens of their own expertise… How terribly human

What links reputation and identity?

It can be argued that before we can evaluate someone’s reputation, we need to be sure that this person is in fact whom he/she claims to be. But what would be the point of constructing a genuine reputation on the basis of a false identity? It’s completely absurd.
One can also argue that somebody could impersonate you with the intent of destroying your reputation. However, it is a common enough occurrence to behold people attempting to destroy the reputation of others without even bothering to mask their own identity. In fact, it is their very identity « I am an expert of … » that will help them destroy the reputation of the other party! The weight and impact of a criticism depends on the credibility of the person making it. An anonymous criticism or one coming from some unknown party holds significantly less value than one coming from someone known and recognized.
Identity theft is much more likely to come from con artists. But their goal won’t be to post a comment on a blog while impersonating you. Instead, their purpose will be to empty your bank account or place an order with your credit card. In this case, if I’m a thief, a cyber-delinquent, am I really going to worry about my reputation?
Finally, before marrying you, your spouse was likely very keen to know whether you had a good reputation. He/she married you based on your reputation (also your physique, your sense of humor,…) not on the basis of your identity card. Before hiring you, your employer asked you for your diplomas and your references (elements of your reputation); your employer never verified your identity except on your first day working for the company/organization, doing so for purely administrative purposes (salary, social security,…). Your reputation got you hired, not your identity.

Thus, identity and reputation are 2 autonomous concepts. Identity is what’s at stake in the fight against financial fraud. Reputation is what’s at stake within the framework of our digital lives. Publishing a photo on Flickr, a video on Youtube, a post or a comment on a blog is a part of my digital life which in no way affects my identity but which can positively or negatively impact my reputation.

IV. What is digital identity?

Here are some of the features of digital identity:

1 - Identity is tied to a person

We have 3 types of identity:
- A professional identity with our professional contact information (job title, company department, telephone, fax & office numbers, etc.). This identity allows authentication with respect to enterprise applications (messaging, intranet, business applications, etc.). It is generally stored in the enterprise LDAP directory.
- A personal identity linked to our personal contact information (home address, home telephone number, etc.). This identity allows authentication with respect to “general public” applications such as e-commerce sites.
- An administrative identity linked to administrative information (social security number, tax id, shared patient record, etc.). This identity allows us to carry out administrative procedures.

Excerpted from Tendances.it

2 - Identity is objective

It is comprised of factual and readily observable elements.

3 - Your identity is checked by third parties

Service providers on the Internet need to check your identity within the context of electronic transactions:
-> e-Commerce (selling/buying) - It is important to be able to verify the real identity of a seller or a buyer in case of litigation (non-payment, substandard product,…)
-> Wiring of funds, payments, opening of bank accounts, …

4 - Digital identity can make your life easier!

Some services allow you to register for several other services by using a single account. For example, by creating an account on OpenID.net you can then register automatically with several other services without having to reenter your first & last name, your email address,… Very practical!

V. What is digital reputation?

To speak of digital reputation is to answer the following question: how are my actions evaluated by my social and professional networks? Here are some of the features of digital reputation:

1 - Reputation is tied to an evaluation

Reputation is a mutual evaluation by 2 people trying to establish the context in which they can trust each other. Each establishes “a sphere of trust”.

You can trust someone to do certain things but not others. A Formula 1 driver is a priori someone you can trust to drive a race car. But would you ask him to build your house? The trust you place in a person isn’t absolute; it is context-specific. With each person in your social network, you implicitly define a “context of trust” (a “sphere of trust”) with respect to roles, abilities or personal qualities. You can not say you trust someone without specifying the context in which you trust them.
For example, here is how Jack could define his context of trust with respect to his colleague Martin (defining what is inside and what is outside the sphere of trust):

-> Jack trusts Martin when it comes to managing a team, marketing and creativity (roles, abilities and personal qualities within Jack’s sphere of trust regarding Martin)

-> Jack doesn’t know whether he can trust Martin when it comes to managing a project, maintaining computer systems or when it comes to his loyalty towards the company (outside Jack’s sphere of trust)

-> Jack doesn’t trust Martin when it comes to managing innovation, accounting or when it comes to his punctuality (outside Jack’s sphere of trust)

In summary, with each person within your social network, you implicitly define a sphere of trust. This sphere of trust can include roles, areas of expertise, abilities and personal qualities. These elements serve as the basis for the trust you place in a person within your network. Inversely, outside the sphere of trust, you’re not comfortable saying you trust this person.

2 - Reputation is subjective

Reputation is a social evaluation that more or less matches reality. To convey our perception of someone, we most often resort to expressing our opinions. But our opinion is a value judgement which does not necessarily rely on observable or quantifiable facts or data. Thus the evaluation can be fair or unfair!

3 - We do not control our own reputation

We do not control our own reputation in the sense that we can not prevent others from forming an opinion about us and sharing it with others. We can, however, manage our reputation:

-> By adopting socially-acceptable behaviors conducive to a good reputation. This is a very useful mechanism of social control for self-regulating human interactions.

-> By using reputation-management tools available in particular, but not exclusively, on the Internet. These allow us to better communicate (content aggregators), better evaluate (more facts, fewer opinions) or better monitor (alert services monitoring both positive and negative reviews made about us thereby enabling us to respond in a timely and suitable fashion). This blog will soon review these tools in greater detail.

5 - The benefits of managing one’s reputation

Managing one’s digital reputation is useful for:
- searching for a job, making yourself known
- offering services (consultants, freelancers,…)
- increasing the value of your expertise
- boosting your career
- meeting friends and lovers

VI. What are the stakes?

The issue of digital identity presents mainly technical problems which are in no way insurmountable with a little technique! The issue of reputation presents, above all, novel social problems in the sense that the Internet creates a new context for human interactions.
When it comes to digital identity, the main issues are: How to create a digital identity card? How to transition from paper to digital? How to check someone’s identity remotely, in the absence of face to face interaction?
Mastering the issue of digital reputation requires inventing a new mode of evaluation, a new way to think about someone’s reputation on the Internet and in particular within social networks. That is the objective of this blog!

This post was inspired by, and I would like to thank, the following:
http://www.fredcavazza.net
http://fr.techcrunch.com
http://www.outilsfroids.net/
http://www.tendances.it

The trust that your close ones place in you can be measured by what is called “reputation”, a word whose root stems from the Latin “reputatio”, meaning “evaluation”. Reputation is thus a social evaluation, or more simply put it is the opinion of one or more people about another person. An opinion is a value judgement and as such it has a subjective dimension. Sometimes, it rests on observable and incontrovertible facts; other times, on rumors, prejudices, even wholecloth fabrications aimed at destroying a rival.

The evaluation centers on a person, a group of people (a community) or an organization (a company). Certain companies have full-time, dedicated entities or people managing their organization’s reputation. As feedback sites (e.g. ePinions, Tripadvisor,…), discussion boards and above all blogs grow, their role will only become more important.

Reputation is a very old mechanism of social control in the sense that each of us seeks to garner the best possible personal reputation (either consciously or unconsciously). In theory, this acts as a strong incentive to behave in socially acceptable ways. For example, it is better to tell the truth than be thought and tagged with the reputation of a liar!

We all have a reputation, whether we like it or not! Our reputation is mostly made or broken through the spoken word and everyone knows how ephemeral those are… For people burdened with a bad reputation, it is easy to make a fresh start by moving to a new town or new company. For those with a good reputation, each move means having to rebuild that reputation from scratch. But today, our social interactions take place more and more through the written word via the Web. If spoken words disappear, written ones endure.

The Internet is a game changer. The written word gains in importance. When a blogger or a person on a discussion board provides negative feedback about another person or a company, their comment is not only set down for all eternity, it is also accessible by anyone anywhere on the planet. In a way, it can be said that our reputation is now global and public, whether we want it to be or not. By ignoring this space, technophobes or « digital immigrants » can hide their heads in the sand. However, do they know what is being said about them in cyberspace? What are they doing to get their version of the facts heard? Probably nothing! They’re taking a ride in the backseat of someone else’s car, all the while wondering where they’re going…

Our reputation is reliant upon our actions. Sometimes, we behave well; other times, we are incompetent and awkward. It is important that the Internet not focus attention on our shortcomings and failures to the exclusion of our good qualities and successes. The Internet can thus become a place of opportunity for some and a hellish one for others. Amateurism is no longer an option. It is vital to know what is being said about us. It is better to manage our Internet reputation than to leave it to someone else to take care of in our stead. We must take our digital destiny in our own hands; otherwise, our destiny will occur without our knowledge or rather without our full assent!