Marketing Pilgrim

Wink.com says they’re the largest people search engine in the world. But to me, they look like a people meta-search engine, pulling their information from the web at large as well as from MySpace, LinkedIn and other people search engines. Now they’re expanding their site to include profiles.

For once, the connection between a product (the people search website) and a social network actually made perfect sense to me: you can “claim” your profile in search results, then add to it or modify it.

The Wink Blog features a rundown of the key benefits of the new social network and I think they put the right one first.

• Control Over False or Defamatory Content: “Wink provides the owner of each profile complete authority to edit, correct or remove any content – photos, tags, labels, descriptions, links or feeds – in their profile. This helps them prevent false or defamatory information from persisting, and lets them present themselves as they’d like to be seen.”
• Detailed Public Search Listings: “including their biography, interests, work, school and other
  information. Additionally each profile can have multiple photos”
• Friend Feeds: Not just tracking your friends’ Wink profiles, but all “view a feed of their friends’ postings to any RSS-enabled site such as Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, and Amazon Wish Lists, wherever they are across the Web.”
• Contact Me: “People can choose to have those who find them on Wink leave a message at Wink, reach them via their favorite social network, instant messenger service, Skype, email or phone.”
• Profile Claiming and Control: “People can use the industry standard MicroID to verify their ownership of webpages and public profiles found on Wink.com. Or they can associate a publicly known email address (work, school or personal) with their public search
  listing on Wink.com”

The bottom line: While none of us need another social network (do we?), the ability to have the final say in controlling your profile is always a boon for your online reputation management.