In a blog post about a month ago, we featured Rapportive for a smarter Gmail to build greater rapport with clients, business partners, and industry contacts. In its latest update, Rapportive incorporated greater integration with Facebook as a great way to interact with email contacts with the largest social networking site without leaving your inbox. Business relationship-building is spilling-over into social media platforms that were once thought to be the providence of the personal. What you now have to consider is whether the content you have in your social profile – Facebook, in this case – might be deemed offensive. A comment made in passing from your foul-mouth roommate from grad school, though not made nor endorsed by you, might have negative repercussions when read by a prospective client. But with the number of interactions made daily on Facebook, compounded by the years since you first joined, makes this level of micromanagement very difficult. Enter startup Socioclean.
Socioclean is a program that scans social profiles (currently available only for Facebook in development to expand into other social networking sites) for 5,000 words and phrases that may be perceived as derogatory such as racial, profane, drug-related or alcohol-related epitaphs. After Socioclean sifts through your Facebook profile, it gives you a letter grade evaluation and a list of inappropriate “hits” on your profile that you can easily click and conveniently delete. Although Socioclean does a good job scanning your entire profile from the first day you joined, it doesn’t, however, review hits within context. For example, “fire” may be flagged as “aggressive” (pyromania perhaps?) even within the context of “volunteering as a camp counselor and scaring the kids with camp ‘fire’ stories.” In using Socioclean, be sure to evaluate each hit. While “fire” might be deemed “aggressive,” it might be worthwhile to keep the aforementioned comment and read by prospective clients if you’re an expanding business in the field of after-school kids’ daycare center.
Other online services you should consider in managing your online reputation in conjunction with Socioclean are Reputation.com and Brand-Yourself. Socioclean, currently, is the only known service that scans social profiles. Reputation.com and Brand-Yourself, on the other hand, take an SEO approach in social reputation management; they push up positive search results about you or your company and push down negative search results.
Written By: Jaszver Bauzon
