As regular readers will have noticed, I’ve moved my blog posts to a daily frequency. I was concerned that I’d find enough to write about – but in the last two weeks I’ve been struggling to filter buckets of ideas and prioritise topics.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to interview the co-founder of a new service called MyWebCareer – and expected that to be the sole topic of today’s post. However, today has seen the launch of a new Personal Relationship Management (PRM) service called Connected – and I’ve decided to feature both together in a two-part series!
The cross over of the services has given me much food for thought – so I will review separately and round up with conclusions in the second part.
As you can see from the title of this post, when you want to assess your Personal Network – there are a lot of questions to be answered. Both of these services provide answers – but in subtly different ways.
If Connected is offering PRM – then MyWebCareer is a PFM (Personal Footprint Manager). As well as test driving the MyWebCareer service, I also had a chance to chat to one of the co-founders, Nip Zalavadia. Nip filled me in on how the business was started and on the idea of “footprints”. It’s an intriguing story…
Nip and the co-founders come from a very different world. They have “experience in developing mission critical solutions for US Federal Law Enforcement, Intelligence, and Forensics clients.”. Nip pointed out: “Our expertise comes from one of the very few areas where Government practices are far in advance of the private sector. Footprints are the low level traces that people leave behind – and in our former employment used to help us find criminals.” The premise of MyWebCareer is that they can work for YOU to help understand the “footprint” you leave when you are on-line – and what future employers might find out about you.
To use the service, you grant MyWebCareer access to your social media acccounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) – and to supplement this they analyse other public data from places like Stack Overflow (particularly relevant to programmers) and trawling the “Deep Web”.
It all sounds rather sinister – and when I looked through their review of “My Score Guidance”, some of the observations were quite “spooky”. The information collated was surprisingly thorough – and their conclusions on the ball. It reminded me of the very popular YouTube video on privacy issues – and in particular ordering a pizza in the future.
Nip’s seen the video – but he and the team at MyWebCareer approach this area in a very positive way. For them it’s not about getting people frightened about what’s on-line, it’s about working on the side of his customers to help them understand how a current (or future) employer might view them.
I logged on to the service – and tested it out. The linking to each of the social media networks was very smooth – and the “Dashboard” produced was pretty informative.
MyWebCareer produces an innovative scoring method – with a benchmark and grading for different key areas. Nip explained to me that “this number is produced using sophisticated link analysis, visualization, entity extraction and semantics. In the US the number produced would be a very a familiar scoring method to anyone who tracked their credit ratings – a number called an FICO.” For those not in the US, including me, FICO is short for the Fair Isaac Corporation – a public company that provides credit scoring.
The company has a nice line from one of their Twitter fans “If @Klout and @LinkedIn had a baby, his name would be a new #Startup called @MyWebCareer.” It’s a cool description – and not far off the mark.
The really good things about the service – and is uncommon in many start-ups – is that they’ve thought through the next steps. If you’ve followed the stories here and elsewhere on LinkedIn InMaps launch – there have been many comments along the lines of “that looks great – but what does it mean? What should I do with it?”. Well MyWebCareer is ready with the next steps and answers to your questions. After it has created your score, you can then get a comprehensive breakdown of how the score was collated – and most importantly what you can do to improve it.
I’d encourage you to give MyWebCareer a try. I reckon that it took 30 minutes for me to grant access to services and review the findings. Time well spent – it certainly gave me some pointers. This Beta version is free – and the pro version will be on its way with more gizmos (and a moderate price tag soon). If you are serious about your Personal Brand – this is an important first step in looking at your Personal Network and understanding what impression you are making.
End of Part One – I’ll be back tomorrow to review Connected and then discuss how these services cross-over and compliment. If you need a reminder to pop back – do subscribe to RSS or Email newsletter on the top right (or follow me on Twitter @personalnetwork)