What About.Me for Business?

What About.Me for Business?

In the plethora of social media sites that you can use for business about.me is not an obvious one.

About.me (Usually styled as about.me) is a personal web hosting service co-founded by Ryan Freitas, Tony Conrad and Tim Young in October 2009. The site offers registered users a simple platform from which to link multiple on-line identities, relevant external sites, and popular social networking websites such as Facebook, Flickr, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube. It is characterized by its one-page user profiles, each with a large, often-artistic background image and abbreviated biography.

Having signed up personally for a site I decided to try an experiment on how effective the site might be for a small business or entrepreneur for recruitment, generating new business or networking.

The rest of this blog post is are my findings on this experiment.

Recruitment

I spent some time looking through the profiles of about.me members who described themselves as technical in some way or had a technical image as their page backdrop.  The search function in the site is limited so there is no deep search available. I could however find people in my general location who I recognised has having some of the technical skills I am looking for. Its not the same as looking at LinkedIn for example, but because the site incorporates a direct link from the about.me profile to their LinkedIn profile it was an easy task to follow that person through to the more professionally orientated LinkedIn site.

Generating New Business

In a nutshell, probably not. The site really doesn't have this kind of focus. It's like looking at selfies, the user shares an impression of themselves that they would like to give. Vanity would dictate a lot of peoples choices on the image and text they use on here and that is not the starting point of trying to determine if someone is a potential new business partner. The other aspect is just that, this is a site for people not companies.  

Networking

I think this is a more realistic use of the site. If you're heading somewhere out of your normal patch and want to meet some interesting or like-minded people then this site might work - taking into account the safety side of meeting with strangers. I spotted several profiles that I saved into a collection of people who I just though were fascinating. If I'm heading in their direction I'll be definitely dropping them a note to tell them I'm in town.

Positives

There are a couple of other aspects of this site that I liked and would see as positives.  There is not much by way of messaging between users other than a small note. I like this, I'm not going to be receiving any long winded unsolicited diatribes.  The other thing I liked was the ease of connecting my other social media accounts for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. People can then follow their interest up in me in a number of different ways depending on their preference.

Negatives

The privacy options in the site are a little under-developed. I would have liked to be able to opt out of certain search criteria and to be able to narrow the demographic of the kind of users I would like my page to be shown to.

Conclusion

Overall I'm happy to have the about.me page. Does it meet my business needs? ... not really. People can still discover me and if they are interested enough they can find out more about me and my work, but I don't see this forming part of my business strategy going forward.