Online reputation

Peter

How’s your reputation these days? It looks as if the growth of social sites and web 2.0 content is making us all re-evaluate what constitutes status in the (digital) world.

I picked up on a story a while ago that people in the US were using their character rankings from online games such as World of Warcraft on their CV’s.
Picture this on a CV ‘I am a Mage (wizard) with a Revered reputation and I lead a group of 25 lower level characters’. This person has demonstrated problem solving (Revered is the second to highest level of reputation), commitment (takes some playing to build that reputation) and management skills (25 people must be a small/medium sized company). Probably someone with some useful skills then.

So how else are people ‘judged’ online? Are you an Ebay PowerSeller for example? An Amazon Top 1000 Reviewer? A flickr ‘group admin’ or do you have the most friends on Myspace.

The common theme is that we use new measures to evaluate people digitally and they don’t rely on old world values. The anonymous stranger on Amazon is going to help you make a buying decision purely based on his or her reputation (actually are we all now hermaphrodites online if no one can tell who we are?)

So if the reputation of your brand is important then perhaps you should be asking yourself – how are we scoring against some of these new ‘ratings’?

Maybe online is the new world in which we can rebuild trust in financial services brands.