Vizibility, one of a number of recent startups tackling online reputation management and how that connects with in-person interactions, today took the covers off its new Online Identity Manager designed specifically for enterprise use. The tool builds on their offerings for individual users, providing a bird’s-eye view for management to track how their staff are faring in terms of connecting with clients and potential clients via physical and NFC business cards, email signatures and in search results.
Think of it like the next frontier of performance analytics software: companies can now monitor on a granular level not only how their employees are being represented in search results, but also how they’re doing with face-to-face interactions. Using Vizibility’s QR code scanning and NFC tech, they can check how many times, how often and from what locations and businesses people’s contact information is being referred to and used.
It’s a whole new level of SEO, and Vizibility founder and CEO James Alexander thinks that businesses are ready to embrace it, given the emphasis placed on demonstrable ROI and measurable performance indices.
“We’re all about helping professionals and the companies that they work for control, share and track their online identity,” Alexander explained about the impetus driving adoption of his company’s tools. “We all have a professional web presence, and you’d be hard-pressed going forward not to have things like a LinkedIn page, blog articles, social networking profiles etc. There’s a real tangible economic impact for organizations whose people can’t be found easily online, or when what’s found isn’t accurate or current.”
Now, using the new platform which rolls up metrics for an entire organization’s employees, enterprise customers can see who’s doing a good job of getting their name out there and getting their card scanned, and then drill down and try to discover what about that person’s behavior is causing the high engagement so they can replicate it elsewhere. Depending on their level of subscription, businesses can also have QR codes from employees who’ve since left the company redirect to a company page of their choosing, which helps recoup leads that might otherwise be lost.
The potential downside, of course, is that this represents yet another metric for sales staff and other frontline employees to worry about. Companies could potentially set targets and create performance thresholds based around the new kind of monitoring Vizibility provides. But Alexander thinks that rather than shy away from yet another performance metric, the pros who’ll be using it will welcome the additional yardstick.
“If I’m at McKinsey and 2o to 30 percent of my job is drumming up new business, and my marketing people are able to help me be more effective because they have a global view of what’s going on in our organization, I think I’d find that to be really helpful,” he said. “This is not looking at private information; this is looking at completely public information that’s out in the open, and helping collect that information.”
In the near future, Vizibility hopes to add cross-industry comparisons and benchmarking to help companies get a better look at how their employees are comparing to the industry average and their competitors. All of this is offered on a subscription basis, with different levels of information available for individual employees, depending on a customer’s needs. Pricing starts at $999 per year for basic features, and add-on costs for additional detail begins at $99 per year per user.
Other companies like BrandYourself are doing similar things around trying to make it easier for individuals to take control of their online identity and SEO, but Vizibility is clearly making a play to extend that kind of oversight of individual assets to the enterprise level. It definitely seems like something that brand-conscious businesses would be eager to adopt, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of traction Vizibility musters with this latest service expansion.