Collaborative economy businesses, aided by the power of the Internet, are bringing people together - further than just your circle of family and friends. These organizations, many experiencing rapid growth, have infiltrated almost every sector - you can pair accommodation with Airnbnb, transportation with Uber and Lyft, and catering with Munchery or DoorDash. These collaborative platforms hold the power to put strangers in contact, but they can only do this with a good online reputation. In an article by Reputation VIP (@reputationvip), the importance and effects of an online reputation are discussed in regards to the sharing economy.
The collaborative economy relies on the optimization of both natural and material resources. According to Serge Duriavig (@SergeDuriavig), CEO of Nightswapping, a platform similar to Airbnb, there are two reasons why this is necessary:
“Firstly, the internet is a real accelerator and secondly, a drop in buying power means that we must change our way of consuming.”
As the sharing economy progresses, the number of participants is rapidly increasing - as a result, collaborative platforms are becoming much more aware of their online reputation, and users are trying to determine how to create a stand-out profile and how to select the correct profiles from other members.
With an increasing importance in how strangers view each other, we are seeing many platforms emerge trying to dominate control over online reputations. We recently interviewed Trustcloud, a platform that offers “trust and safety for the sharing economy” by creating a trust score for every member - click here to listen to the podcast. Famust is a platform that collects online comments and evaluations surrounding a person and utilizes the information to create a profile for the user, thereby giving the user the ability to provide the public link to their Famust profile when posting or responding to an ad. Traity, a Spanish company similar in function to Famust, just raised $4.7 million in capital, and they aim to become the leading reference for collaborative organizations in online reputation management. On their platform, users are awarded Olympic-style medals (bronze, silver, gold) that correspond to their level or reputation. The majority of members on these platforms have good online reputations. Bad member reputations, however, have the power to damage the reputation of, not only the member, but also the collaborative organization as a whole.
Online reputation is essentially internal to the collaborative platform: when a host for Airbnb offers up their home but gets poor reviews, the member loses money but so does Airbnb as an organization, for they get a commission fee every time a member’s accommodation is rented out. If the host’s home gets a bad review, it will most likely be removed as a listing from the platform, therefore incurring a loss of potential money for Airbnb. The actions of members of a platform can also call the brand name into question, for example, ransacked houses on Airbnb can lead to a drop in confidence for potential users, publicly damaging the reputation of the platform.
The loss of income resulting from a poor online reputation has the ability to make or break a business -- after all, collaborative platforms run almost purely on confidence and trust. Ranking systems, reviews, and comments all act as incentives for the user to behave well, preventing malicious behavior from truly affecting the outcome of the platform. With the sharing economy still progressing at a fast pace, more tools have been implemented to instill trust and determine an honest online reputation -- BlaBlaCar just introduced Trustman, a certification and ranking system for users of its platform. With background checks not as accessible or as informative (Does a clean background really entail trustworthiness?) as online trust platforms, these certification systems have increasing prevalence to the running of a collaborative organization.
Moral of the story: Be careful how you behave online, it may affect your future (as well as others’) in more than one way.
Read the source article at Control your Online Reputation
