Matt Mauldin

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.

Popularity: 41% [?]

I now have an account at delicious. See:

I am mattmauldin on Delicious Add me to your network

Delicious is a social web bookmark sharing site that uses a keyword tagging categorization to organize your bookmarks.  So far I really haven’t determined an every-day use for Delicious.  Right now I have the Foxmarks pluglin for Firefox, so my bookmarks automatically sync between the several computers I use.  I don’t have so many bookmarks that I really need a service like Delicious to manage them.

That said, I do like the networking ability.  It is just one more piece of the pie linking all of my sites together.  Here’s a list of things you can do with Delicious:

Cool Things You Can Do With Bookmarks and Tags

1. Research: del.icio.us allows you to keep track of all your online sources if you are working on a paper, an article, or drafting a new blog post.
2. Vacation Planning: Save links to possible destinations, events, hotels, travel sites, cool tours, restaurants and maps using del.icio.us.
3. Event Planning: If you are trying to plan a wedding or another big event you can use del.icio.us tags like “Budget,” “Dresses,” “Venues” or “Honeymoon” to keep your online options organized.
4. Wishlist: Keep an online wishlist of products you’d like for Birthday, Christmas, Valentines Day, Mothers/Fathers day.  Just bookmark the products by using a “Wishlist” tag.
5. Collaboration: Share information with co-workers or friends by creating a shared del.icio.us account or sharing your bookmarks through a network.
6. Discover Popular Resources: Delicious has more that 5 million users, so no matter what you’re looking for, one of the del.icio.us users has bookmarked a site related to it. Discover other users’ resources through a simple search from the del.icio.us homepage.

Popularity: 15% [?]

MediaPost has bee a staple in my daily news intake for several years now. I subscribe to quite a few of their newsletters and they do a great job of covering many aspects of advertising and marketing. So when I learned of my.MediaPost.com, I logged into my account to build my profile right away.

You can view my profile at http://my.mediapost.com/mattmauldin. Let me warn you…it’s sad.

Initially, the experience was just like many of the other social engines out there. I added in some contact information, interests, books, about me, etc. All pretty standard.

Then I got into the “Your Networks” feature, which is one of the best features I’ve seen in an online profile yet. This allows you to enter the address of your other online profiles:

Examples of sites MediaPost’s Your Networks tool: 

• Community – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bebo.
• Media Sharing – YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket.
• Bookmarking - Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Furl.
• Blogs - Blogger, WordPress, and Technorati
• Music - lastfm, SoundClick and MOG.
• Events & Review – yelp, Meet Up, and Upcoming.
• Gaming - Gamespot, and IGN.
• Others - Twitter, Digg, eBay and Amazon.

Don’t be fooled. This is not a comprehensive list. In fact, this isn’t even half of the sites they are integrated with. And even if you don’t find the site you want, you can request that a site be added to the list.

The real problem began when I wanted to add my profile picture. It turned out to be impossible…so far. Seriously? Trouble with a picture? I’ve tried in Firefox, IE and Chrome with no luck. I’ve tried three sizes of JPEGs, a GIF and a PNG. Still no. In fact, I’ve tried no less that a dozen times spread out over several days with absolutly zero success. Every time I try to upload a profile pic, I get this message:

Couldn’t store file to server. (looks like we got not XML document).

OK, media post. It’s time to either get your XML document or offer a little more help here. I can’t find any help documentation or any solution when I google the problem.

In addition to that, I am unable to upload any photos. Everything just craps out and I don’t get any type of error message. I even tried both the form based and Java based uploaders.

Finally, there’s a really cool “Add a feed” option on the profile page. Cool! I’d love to include a few feeds on my profile to help fill out some content and provide links back to my other work. But again, it’s not working. I’ve added my RSS feed, Atom feed, even a Feedburner feed and each time I get the message that says:

sorry, no feeds found at this url

Again, seriously? It’s Feedburner! Their stuff works.

In summary, my.MediaPost.com could have been (and still has the chance) to be a great online profile. But right now there are a few issues holding it back. Maybe I’ll be able to update this post in the near future with an “all is weel” post.

Until then, going to http://my.mediapost.com/mattmauldin is a waste of time.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Today I read a story on SearchEngine Watch called Zappos + Twitter = Innovative Success!

Sage Lewis takes the time here to compare the Twitter profiles of three companies,

1. http://twitter.com/GMblogs
2. http://twitter.com/TheHomeDepot
3. Zappos’ CEO Twitter account

As a newbie on Twitter, this was a really great profile on how to use Twitter. The key is to be genuine. Don’t tweet fake messages, ads, commercials, or self promotion all of the time or you will NOT be followed, and even if you are followed, you will soon be blocked.

Beyond that, Steven Spencer elaborates on Zappos’ use of Twitter in his article Why Zappos is into Twitter – CEO Tony Hsieh speaks:

For Twitter, we don’t really view it as a marketing channel so much as a way to connect on a more personal level, whether it’s with our employees or our existing customers.

Initially, we started getting the entire company more involved with Twitter because we saw it as a great way to help build our company culture. But then we discovered it was also a great way to connect with customers as well.

Now it’s my turn. Check me out at http://twitter.com/mattmauldin for my tweets. Follow me if you’d like.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Yesterday in my post Managing My Online Profiles I mentioned that it was important to manage your online profiles because you never know who is searching for you online.  Today, I found a great resource called Social Media “Hacks” (at SES Toronto). to provide moe advice on this issue.

Read this article, and you’ll find gold advice for your onine profiles.  This blog covers Wikipedia and other wikis, Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, and blogs. (to name a few)

Popularity: 18% [?]