A rather bizarre promotion advertised on LinkedIn
I see a number of adverts for companies that will check my credit rating, and let me know how well (or badly) I am doing.
Now a company advertising on LinkedIn, called Reputation Defender, will help track and defend my reputation on the Internet.
The company is presumably a reputable organisation, but...
Their opening gambit on the website is to register using my name and a lot of very sensitive information like my date of birth, mother's maiden name, and they even have a service where they can keep track of my children on the Internet.
Nowadays anyone with a few cents/pence can set up a web site, and we all get loads of emails purporting to be from a bank where we just need to update all of our security details.
Would you click an add on LinkedIn, and then enter all of your personal details, and then calmly add your children ?
If not, how should Reputation Defender be advertising itself, and how can any company prove that it really does what it says on the web site?
Clarification added August 6, 2009:
Thanks everyone - I think we are all agreed that we would not give our most precious details to an unknown entity on the Internet, even if they advertise on LinkedIn.
Now for the hard part: You are working for this company in a marketing capacity, and they appear to be completely reputable and have a good proposition.
How would you promote the service and at the same time allay fears that this might be some kind of scam?
Anyone up to that challenge ;-)
Clarification added August 7, 2009:
Hi Owen - it is good to see that Reputation Defender works, e.g. you are engaged and defending your reputation!
For the LinkedIn community please note I am not affiliated with Reputation Defender in any way whatsoever.
However, if people do respond to the question as to how Reputation Defender position and market themselves I think it shows off your own creative talents. If not, Owen can always create his own LinkedIn question with perhaps a slightly less bizarre subject line ;-)
Good Answers (1)
Al M.
Volunteer Consultant at Haiti Earthquake Disaster Relief & News
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For every one legitimate place on the Internet, there are probably a million crooks and frauds, and a ton of places in-between, that are legitimate businesses, operating in such a way that your confidential information is not properly secured.
There are government efforts, through FTC for example, to try to clean up the place, but I will believe it when I see it, probably not in my life time.
If you are in the USA, you can go to a government run program that provides you with your credit report for free, once every 12 months, from the three main credit bureaus. See Link # 1.
Note that there are more than 3 credit bureaus, and these reports do not protect you from a wide range of identity theft problems other than credit cards, such as tax fraud, medical id fraud, employment id fraud, driver license driving fraud.
Checking on your credit once every 12 months may be Ok for you, or you may need something more. There are low cost places that can arrange to have sent to you once a month any information that changes on your credit, such as a list of the places that requested info about your credit ... you can then check to see which make sense.
You can contact the credit places and ask that they not give out info about you for marketing purposes. So for example, if you get 20 million banks trying to sell you a credit card by snail mail each month, this probably happened because they went to the credit bureaus and asked for a list of people who are half way decent good credit risks. If you don't want the bother of shredding those offers, maybe you don't want to be on those marketing lists.
Links:
More Answers (9)
Dave V.
Managing Principal at Area 224
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No matter how reputable they are, I wouldn't do it.
Most browser bars right now have a gold "secure" thing on them - and begin with https:// to show that it's secured. Also look for Verisign.
But you, fine sir, are 100% normal to look at this cautiously.
Erica F.
Social Media Optimizer, Publisher at ALC Publishing, President of Yuricon
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It reeks of a protection racket - we know who you are and where your family is...
They should start with examples of how they protected people, rather than starting by threatening you with or requesting personal info. The point is to make me feel scared/safe and want to buy the service. Like hime securoity companies show how a break-in is foiled by their alarm and service.
Cheers,
Erica Friedman
Yurikon LLC
Intelligent Business Promotion
http://www.visualcv.com/elfriedman
Richard F.
Looking for new Enterasys Partners
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Even with HTTPS that only means that the info is entered directly between you and the webserver. Anyone with a website can add HTTPS protocols.
What is the purpose of Reputation Defender? Most of us use social networks and freely enter information. Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn etc. What do they do, log in to your accounts and make sure of what?
James B.
Engineer at Photonis USA
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Even if they are reputable, the more places you share private information the more places the information can be stolen from.
Matthew C.
Account Executive - Interactive at Mid Atlantic Newspaper Services
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Can always run a blog search and see if others have run into issues with the company. The community based nature of the net allows for the spread of negative information very quickly, so if this site is not wholly on the up-and-up then we can be sure a blogger somewhere has or will soon report on the issue.
Links:
I would not. Absolutely not!
Another thing you can easily do is type in "reputation defender review" or "reputation defender scam" into Google and see what comes up.
Plenty of consumer awareness forums will probably have some form of review - whether from the website itself or a former customer who loves/hates the service. Also try searching twitter.
Thanks to everyone on this list for your feedback, and to Brian Merritt for starting this thoughtful conversation on how to market and explain services like ours. It's cool to see some good public discussion around an are our marketing team discusses daily! First, I would like to invite you to our website (www.reputationdefender.com) to learn more about what ReputationDefender does, how we do it, how we've been received in the public, how our security has been externally verified and audited, etc.. Second, I'd like to thank the link particularly for the excellent feedback on how to market our services. We have just started to ramp our marketing, and we're still experimenting with messaging. It's important to us that we come across the way we think we should and deserve to: as people who have your back in giving you the tools you need to protect and control your personal digital information. It sounds as if we may not be coming across that way in all cases just yet! Our view is that the Internet--while doing many wonderful things--is having some pretty unwelcome consequences for people insofar as their personal information, private lives, etc., are being made more searchable, analyzable, etc., every hour that goes by. This has some positive effects but also some negative ones. We have been building technology for the past few years to help people who wish to protect themselves. So the question remains, as Brian said: how do we explain in the most effective way for ourselves? And how do we make sure we differentiate ourselves from some of the less savory types of companies that do exist around the Internet? As the person heading up our marketing efforts, I'd be very glad to spend time by email or phone with anyone on this list who can help us think through how best to position our products as we start to ramp our marketing. In addition, I'd like to invite anyone and everyone here to try our MyRep or MyChild products free (you can cancel at any time with a simple email) with the following code: OWENLINK. We would welcome your open input on how to improve them. And I'd welcome everyone to email me directly at otripp[at]reputationdefender.com, or to call me on our number 1-888-720-9980, and maybe even to visit our offices in Redwood City, California! Meanwhile, we'd welcome the conversation to keep going here or elsewhere, and we'd like to participate. Thanks again for the candid feedback and thoughts. Owen Tripp, Founder and COO, ReputationDefender.
Links:
Elizabeth (Beth) S.
Program Integrity Specialist at Minnesota Dept. of Health - WIC/CSFP
This relates back to the original fraud concerns rather than the marketing issues. Whenever I see questions relating to fraud and the internet, I like to make people aware of the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a partnership that includes the U.S. FBI. Not only does the IC3 provide a means of reporting suspected fraud involving cybercrime, but they include some good prevention tips and links to resources.
