A Service for Active Netizens

Thursday, July 19, 2007 | 4 comments

If you are trying to do a web PR campaign, you know you have to pitch to the bloggers. The good news is, bloggers are highly visible, easy to identify, and very reachable.

Entering the market is a new service that wants to identify people who are the most active members of various online communities, but not the anchor blogger. These are the people who comment a lot on blog posts, or post a lot of entries on message boards and news groups. They ask and answer questions on LinkedIn or Yahoo Answers.

SezWho wants to help these active netizens gain reputation that is transferable across communities. You may have seen them on my Comments section. Yes, this is the company that powers the comment rating and review function of my blog. We installed the service about 3 weeks back, and in that time, my profile has been viewed 695 times, and people have clicked through to my site 394 times, translating into additional page views. That’s a 56.69% click-through rate.

SezWho is also live right now on ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. I introduced Jitendra Gupta, the entrepreneur, to Matt Marshall, Om Malik, James Governor, Paul Kedrosky, Tom Foremski, and a bunch of other high profile bloggers, and Matt was the first to roll them out. I am curious to hear what Om, James, Paul and Tom have to say on the service, and whether they see their communities benefiting from it.

Jitendra’s hypothesis is that the active netizens want some sort of a reputation building program that transfers across communities. So, the first order of business here is to check whether the service is desired and found useful by its users.

If that hypothesis checks out [they have about 50,000 users so far], then I see an interesting opportunity for marketeers to leverage this active netizen community in their campaigns.

So, for those of you who have tried this out, do you like to have it on this site (and others)?

Bookmark It