SezWho Community Bridge Helps the Just, Hampers the Harmful

Here's an interesting social media service that may not be (entirely) froth, though it's still too soon to tell. SezWho is an offering that helps site owners build traffic and community participation by joining “islands of content,” like blogs and other media, with the gruntwork of crossover participants.

Perhaps most meaningfully, the offering is designed to help good content providers build integrity that then follows them across other social media. To illustrate, imagine that the eBay seller score you worked so hard to build was meaningful outside of the eBay community.

SezWho enables the following:

• Social media cross-connections, based on the participants each destination has in common
• Users can browse user generated content - the “best” of which is highlighted - based on other contributors
• Lends context on each community contributor with a content-joining profile page (here's a good illustration from the FAQ page)
• More organic traffic, with reciprocal community attention
• Lets readers vote on good content, and rewards good contributors with “portable credibility”

SezWho operates mainly via plugins, which help users rate contributions and highlights useful content via AJAX. The latest interactions on a given social media platform, such as a blog, wiki or discussion board, is updated on the SezWho server, which in turn updates the submissions on a unifying platform: the web portal itself.

Users can manage their profiles after a registration process. Their profiles also reflect their contributor statistics, which is calculated based on an algorithm that gauges frequency of participation, time of interaction, existing reputation scores for both rater and commenter, participation consistency, and even discussion topic.

The idea of “portable credibility” is interesting. What SezWho most notably does is carry over a user's reputation (good or bad, so mind your online networking ethics) across the social media utilized by said user.

Best to follow McGovern's advice on only publishing what's useful. It's almost unspeakably damaging to (consistently) publish incorrect information.

SezWho advises that if you want to maintain a strong “Star Power,” or reputation score, you should make constructive comments, rate the comments of others and remain active in your myriad communities.

And considering this score reverberates across all of said communities, that's pretty good incentive to keep it positive.

Users are identified by their email addresses, from which unique system-generated names are created for the SezWho interface. (The name can be changed.) Multiple emails can be applied to the same account, which is recommended to for “[building] your reputation quickly across all your email addresses (irrespective of which one you choose to use on a particular blog), and also you can maintain one public profile across your different email addresses.

At present SezWho supports Wordpress and MovableType, but a plugin for other blogging platforms is in the works.

Interested bloggers or other social media devotees can register for an account, after which they'll receive access keys for their blogs. Once the SezWho plugin is activated, statistics can be tracked from the SezWho interface.

For you early adopter types, SezWho is still in beta, so take a look before the word gets out and you lose your chance to say, “I was totally there on the ground floor.”

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