* Building your reputation with iKarma
Reputation has become an important issue for online businesses. Unless you’re dealing with a well-known corporation or major retailer, the distance and anonymity inherent on the Internet makes the question of whether you should be doing business with someone an important one.
Sites such as eBay have provided an infrastructure that provides the ability to discover someone’s reputation and a degree of insurance over fraudulent or misleading activities. However, in the general marketplace there is usually no way for you to determine a potential product vendor’s or service provider’s reputation.
IKarma would like to change that. The concept behind its service is simple: Get businesses to register, get them to solicit reviews from their contacts, and then have the registrants display the iKarma seal on their sites, in their e-mail signatures, in fact, in all of their marketing and sales materials. When users click on a seal they are shown the rating, or “iKarma,” of the registrant.
Registration requires entering your name, company, an iKarma ID, etc., plus a captcha code and following a confirmation link to enable your account.
Web Apps Rules Department: iKarma’s registration form asks for you to choose your “iKarma ID” so I entered a name with spaces. A popup told me the ID couldn’t have spaces or a whole range of characters, so I entered a three letter string and was told by another popup that my ID had to be a minimum of five characters long. This gives us Web Applications Rule 249: If you ask someone to fill a field that has formatting restrictions tell them what those restrictions are before they enter anything.
Once your account is enabled you can optionally create a profile (this and other optional steps can be done later). The next step, also optional, is to import your e-mail contacts which you are going to request reviews from. IKarma can import your contacts from Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, the Windows Address Book, Mozilla Thunderbird and Suite, Evolution, Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail.
The next step generates a seal for your e-mail signature in a variety of color schemes, sizes and layouts and exports it to your mail client using a Java applet. This feature is actually a very slick idea, but horribly hard to pull of in the real world.
For exporting to Outlook the iKarma software requires that Outlook is restarted. The problem was that my copy of Outlook has a large number of add-ons installed, and it looked like Nelson Email Organizer blocked the process. At least the iKarma export software noticed and advised me to restart it manually, but after I restarted Outlook it crashed. When Outlook again restarted properly without crashing again (I breathed a big sigh of relief), then I opened a new message and there was the signature – corrupted (looks like a table layout snafu). I sent the message to myself and after receipt, the signature rendered properly. I have no idea what the problem is.
Web Applications Rule 250: Don’t mess with e-mail clients or any external client side software unless you absolutely have to and you are insanely confident you won’t cause a problem. Get it wrong and do something like screw up people’s e-mail and you could damage your reputation big time!
At this point you can go to the account management section and edit a whole range of details about yourself and what you do. You can also send out review requests, get seals for Web sites, get code to display your reviews in real time on your Web site or create specific text links for use in a Web content. You can even get an iKarma Search Bar for FireFox and Flock that allows you to search for iKarma users and groups, and if you are a registered iKarma user you can directly access your iKarma profile.
In short, iKarma is very ambitious and aims to cover a lot of territory in reputation management by integrating their services with Web sites, browsers, and marketing programs. The challenge for the company will be to get enough people using the iKarma service to ensure that they are relevant to doing business in general.
Reputation services also raise interesting issues for the businesses or people being rated such as what do you do if you get bad ratings? The iKarma FAQ deals with that question and provides some checks and balances for dissatisfied registrants to manage and challenge negative comments.
To see most of what iKarma offers you’ll have to register, but that’s fast compared to how watching their “tour” feels.
Web Applications Rule 251: Get on with it! We don’t have time for your TV ad style pitch – we want the facts more than we want flying text and cute cartoons.
IKarma is, as I wrote earlier, a very ambitious concept. What the company needs is an alliance with a really big brand such as a bank and its tens of thousands of small businesses, or a major online retailer such as eBay or Amazon.
On the topic of making money, iKarma’s FAQ notes that “In the future, paid service options will become available for very affordable monthly fees. The basic service, however, will always remain free of charge.”
A great idea and one to keep an eye on. And if iKarma doesn’t get it right, someone will – the idea is too good not to succeed somehow.
