Matt Mauldin - Marketing Pro

Naymz Profile: Pro or Con(s)?

Written by Matt Mauldin on Thursday, November 06, 2008

Naymz.com is a business-related social network targeting mainly the same market as LinkedIn.  I was turned on to Naymz after reading an article about their profiles being well optimized to show high in the SERPs.  I am mostly interested to see how soon it will take to see my Naymz profile show up. You can see my profile here:

Is Naymz Spammy?
One user, Ben Poole didn't find Naymz very helpful.  I wouldn't either if I had his Spam experience here:
http://benpoole.com/weblog/200801222050
But read carefully past the post and you'll find some very interesting comments, even from one of Naymz co-founders, Tom Drugan.  Tom responded only 1 day after Ben first posted the problem.  I find that to be very responsive and I certainly wouldn't expect that from any employee of the big social networks.

One feature Naymz allows is to automatically log into other accounts you own (Yahoo mail, Gmail, LinkedIn, etc) and send an invite to your network of contacts. Volker Weber, http://vowe.net/archives/009346.html, found this very annoying.  So did many of his readers, as noted in comments to this post.
(Notice also that Tom Drugan responded withing a couple of days to Volker's post also)

Stalkers on Naymz
Naymz has been called A Stalker Enabled Social Network by some because of they provide detailed tracking, including IP address, geographic location, and what time you visited a profile.

Whatever.  Just spend a few minutes on MySpace or Facebook and you can find zip codes, email and IM addresses, hometowns and current towns, and who knows what else.  Sure, you won't know the exact time of a visit, but you can have a fairly good idea of who is reading your profile.  This isn't anything new - if someone is serious about tracking you down, your information can be found.

Why will I keep using Naymz?
So Naymz has trouble with spam, provides some questionable tracking practices, and has a much lower adoption than other social sites.  But there is 1 reason that will determine if I continue to use Naymz, and it goes back to the overall goal of "Reputation Management".

That is, if Naymz can get a SERP listing onto page 1 in Google and Yahoo for my name, then this is well worth it.  That is a whole 10% of the SERP page that I may or may not control without a Naymz profile.

I may not use their premium services, invite my friends, or even spend much time here at all.  But taking up valuable real estate on the SERPs for a page 1 is a benefit that I don't want to pass up!  Stay tuned and I'll update in a later post on the results.