Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Unvarnished: Personal and professional reviews

Your professional and personal reputation are next up for review – by anybody – on the Unvarnished website. Unvarnished gives an opportunity for anyone to post their “review” of you as a person. Unvarnished could definitely be useful, but it could also end up being a pain to handle. Denying you the best personal loan rates will, at least, hopefully not become a way that Unvarnished gets used.

Using Unvarnished as reputation management

Unvarnished invites people to post their reviews of other people. The claim of Unvarnished is that it will help you “manage your career growth”. Any user can post a review, and any user can create their own profile. User’s identities are verified using Facebook profiles. When the link to Facebook seems more legitimate, but faking out a payday loan company is harder than faking out Facebook.

The issues Unvarnished raises

The challenge that Unvarnished presents is much the same as Yelp and RipOffReport.com. A review website could be incredibly helpful in making decisions. Especially with bad reviews, there are two sides to every story. Unvarnished claims to have a “community” system that will help keep bad reviews in check. The simple reality of Unvarnished is that unhappy people are more likely to speak out than unhappy people. This means that Unvarnished could present an unvarnished – if very skewed – view of you.

Should you get an Unvarnished profile?

Yes, reviews on Unvarnished could be very skewed. Managing an Unvarnished account could also be a real pain. However, within the end, most professionals and businesspeople would do well to get an Unvarnished account. Knowing what other people have to say is important. An Unvarnished account will allow you to see and reply to feedback others have. Wherever you work, your online reputation is becoming as important as your reputation anywhere else.



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