A new social media service, Unvarnished, which entered its beta phase just yesterday, is already drawing ire and raising trepidation among many professionals. With the wild popularity of social media, why is the launch of Unvarnished causing such a stir? This quote from a TechCrunch article explains:
Today, Unvarnished makes its beta debut. It’s essentially Yelp for LinkedIn: any user can create an online profile for a professional and submit anonymous reviews. You can claim your profile, but unlike LinkedIn, you have to accept every post, warts and all. And once the profile is up there’s no taking it down.
I asked co-founder, Peter Kazanjy, “Will you ever give users the option to take down their profile?” Kazanjy’s reply: “No, because if we did that, everyone would take their profile down” (see our video with Kazanjy after the break). Thus Unvarnished is a service that depends (and ultimately profits) on digital paranoia and our growing anxiety when it comes to our online identity. Doesn’t give you the warm fuzzies but (as Mike Arrington points out in “Reputation is Dead”) it is perhaps a logical evolution of social media. The site’s fundamental concept is not new (ikarma.com, Jerk.com) but Unvarnished has the best interface to attract a large community of professionals.
This type of site, where users can create a profile for you without your consent or knowledge and then anonymously post anything they like on it, is a crisis management nightmare waiting to happen. With hundreds of profiles already on the site, even in the beta stage, and no way to refute false claims except actively reply to them, businesses and individual professionals may be forced to become frequent users of this site in order to protect their own reputations.
The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/