Interestingly, that goes for both service providers and their users. On the provider side, Yahoo’s Luke Beatty, it’s VP and GM of community, thinks that users understand that the way sites operate and rank them will change. However, he said, “I don’t think anyone has a problem with the change as much as they have a problem with the transparency.”

Matt Thompson, VP of platform at Klout, echoed. “The desire to be transparent and the execution to be transparent are two different things,” he said, “and we stink at the execution right now.”

Transparency is so critcal, Beatty said, because how sites rate users will change over time. Behavior or skills that used to be important might change, and users looking to establish reputations need to know.

There might be a limit, though. Trada CEO Niel Robertson said he believes in half-transparency, kind of like the way Google only gives a guideline as to how its AdWords algorithm works. Users — in Trada’s case freelance, crowdsourced workers — need to know the criteria, he said, but if you’re completely open they might look to start gaming the system.

When it comes to users, transparency (aka the opposite of anonymity) is important for taking reputation with them across sites. Being chattygirl32 in the New York Times comments section, for example, isn’t so helpful when you try to leverage online reputation elsewhere. A real name, however, might stick.

Of course, using real names is also helpful in letting platform providers know who they’re dealing with. Robertson said Trada requires workers to use their real names, and Beatty said Yahoo does the same for people it pays for content. On Klout, Thompson said, tying together multiple anonymous accounts wouldn’t be too helpful — a real name, at least, is what what ties your influence to your reputation.

Robertson made another good point that often goes overlooked, which is that making user transparency might start spreading beyond users’ control, and beyond the web. There are all sorts of sites ranking doctors, for example, but he thinks we’re ripe for a time when doctors start rating patients, landlords rating tenants and the like.

You can hide behind all the screen names in the world, but don’t think those with whom you do business in the real world will be so accomodating.

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The IPO of professional social network LinkedIn is probably the most significant web stock issue since Google, so I wanted to take a moment to reflect on LinkedIn’s impact on the world of work. Though ostensibly a general-purpose social networking tool for professionals, and nowhere near as big as Facebook in terms of number of users (LinkedIn has some 100 million users, compared with over 500 million on Facebook), LinkedIn has become an important tool for connecting job seekers and employers, notably introducing several key innovations that repositioned the standard social network profile as a kind of “digital resume,” complete with features with which a user can showcase their skills and demonstrate their professional reputation.

A Digital Resume

Like other social networking apps, LinkedIn enables its users to build a profile and connect with other users. LinkedIn differs from its competition because it defines a user’s profile in terms of work history, rather than other personal details. At its most basic, it’s simply an online version of the traditional printed resume, listing a user’s work history and academic qualifications. However, coupled with LinkedIn’s reputation tools, the profile becomes much more powerful, giving employers more insight into the capabilities of a particular candidate — an attractive proposition for both employers and job seekers.

A Way to Demonstrate Reputation

LinkedIn introduced two key social network profile reputation innovations: Recommendations and LinkedIn Answers. Recommendations allows users to post endorsements from people they’re worked with on their profiles, which are then associated with the particular job the recommendation is for; they’re like an online version of the traditional reference. Despite concerns that the Recommendations system can be gamed — users offering to give each other fake recommendations to bolster their profile, for example — it does provide a way for employers to screen candidates. Employers using LinkedIn Jobs can even limit applications to users with a certain number of Recommendations.

LinkedIn Answers provides a way for users to demonstrate their expertise by answering business questions posted by the community. These answers are then added to the user’s profile, enabling users to showcase their knowledge and providing potential employers or business partners with more information about a potential candidate.

Recommendations and Answers are complementary. While Recommendations can be used to assess what a particular user is like to work with, Answers is a way to assess a user’s knowledge.

The Future

While LinkedIn would probably like to be more than just a Web 2.0 job board, those functions drive a significant portion of its income, so it needs to make sure its digital resume stays relevant. While a LinkedIn profile was once the best way for people to showcase their skills and experience online,  there are now many more ways to measure a person’s digital reputation — Klout score, Odesk and Elance reviews, and Quora answers, for example — which arguably could be even more valid; LinkedIn will need to make sure it doesn’t get overtaken by these newer services.

Additionally, with an increasing number of freelancers in the work market, LinkedIn needs to cater to them specifically. Currently, LinkedIn’s Jobs section is heavily skewed towards traditional employment, while its Answers section is seemingly mainly inhabited by consultants and freelancers. It should reconcile this disconnect by providing a way for freelancers and consultants to find employment though the service, perhaps by modifying its existing Jobs section, or perhaps by integrating an Elance-like freelance jobs marketplace.

As Stacey noted when the IPO was filed, the funds raised should enable the company to make some savvy acquisitions to round out its business offering, perhaps even including acquiring some companies that currently provide services to freelancers, or reputation-based services. Whether those purchases and its own innovations will keep it ahead of competition like Facebook, the newer reputation-based start-ups, and even the traditional job boards like Monster.com, remains to be seen.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Coletivo Mambembe

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Here is a breakdown of how to use Quora, Focus and Namesake to enhance your professional reputation.

Quora

I recently wrote about using Quora for getting answers to business-related questions. While I think the quality of conversation on Quora can be good, sometimes you feel like you are posting a question into a big, black hole. Still, with the amount of buzz happening around the site, getting in now to “stake your claim” in your areas of expertise isn’t a bad idea.

When starting to use Quora as a reputation-builder, make sure to fill out your profile information thoroughly, including the sections on the site where you can include your “bio” for various topics. Even if you aren’t ready to spend time answering questions, you want to make sure your expertise is showcased concisely, otherwise people will arrive at your Quora profile page and have no idea who you are or what you do. Keep the length down and make sure the first handful of words convey something meaningful because this is what others will see when you answer questions in a given topic area.

To get more out of Quora, follow the topics that you believe you can contribute meaningfully to. Respond to questions when you have a specific point of view or expertise that hasn’t yet been demonstrated. Follow the people with whom you are truly interested in getting on their radar, learning from, or interacting with.

Quora has a section in your profile where you can post content. This can be a good place to re-purpose some of your relevant content and tagging it with specific topic keywords to add your two cents without specifically answering a question. You can also answer a question and link to your content elsewhere, although do this sparingly as this can appear gratuitous if you simply use Quora to point people to your blog or site. Don’t think of Quora as a “gateway” to your other presences, like your blog, but instead think of it as an opportunity to provide a snapshot of who you are and what you do on a site where people are paying attention.

Because of Quora’s breadth of topics, you can choose almost any area and set of topics to show what you know. However, the most active areas are the tech, new and social media, and mobile spaces.

Focus

If your expertise is useful to small business owners, you may want to head over to Focus. This site has been around a few years now and while Quora came out of beta with a bang, Focus has been building a rich database of information and experts a little under the radar and now boasts over a million active users. While Quora tackles a broad range of topics, Focus looks to help business owners make better decisions, so expect to find more business topics and technology topics related to business.

On Focus, Q&A is only one of the site’s features. Think of it as an expert network or “expert market” where business owners can not only get answers to their questions but download published research and attend live teleconference events.

As you fill out your Focus profile, you can opt to check a box to apply to become an official “expert” on the site, but there is no guarantee you’ll be chosen. Focus takes a careful look at several criteria to assess if you are actually an expert in your field and if you have a proclivity for sharing your knowledge with others in a longer format such as on a blog versus Twitter. They also look at your interactions and the retweets your content generates to see if what you write resonates with your community of followers.

If interested in having you as an official expert on their site, Focus will conduct a phone interview. Some experts providing long form research are compensated but not those solely participating in the community Q&A. Otherwise, you can contribute to the Q&A section in basically the same way you might on Quora. The site is constantly undergoing incremental changes to improve how it works, so expect to see better integration of features over time.

Namesake

Namesake calls itself a “community for real conversation.” Namesake takes a more “live” approach to conversations on topics, with announcements of conversations happening on the site, and the people participating and watching.. The conversations are then archived and can be added to over time.

There is a little more chaos on Namesake compared to Quora or Focus.com; every response isn’t carefully composed and the best aren’t always “endorsed” or voted up to the top. These are “conversations” after all. Namesake groups people, conversations and experts by topic, so like Quora and Focus, you should follow the topics that are most interesting and relevant to you, to find experts and to identify conversations where you can be an expert.

The site claims experts in broad topic areas, from technology to entertainment to politics. You can claim your areas of expertise (up to 10) when you are filling out your bio, but you gain expert credibility and status through endorsements from others for your conversation contributions. A nice feature on your Namesake bio is the ability to add video to showcase who you are and what you know.

Whereas Quora might feel like a place for tech insiders, and Focus is more business-oriented and straightforward, Namesake has a scrappier feel where tech hipsters are jumping into a sandbox to play and experiment.

Tips for Q&A Site Success

As you can see, all of these sites have Q&A as a feature, but Quora emphasizes this aspect the most. Regardless of which site you choose as your platform for showcasing your expertise, know that the process can be time-consuming (and possibly addicting). Here are a few tips for making the most of your efforts:

1. Pick one site. Be great. While you might dabble in all three sites to get a feel for them and to make sure they offer you the best audience for your information, to get more out of a Q&A site, you really need to pick one where you’ll spend most of your time and energy. Be thoughtful, and take care to get a feel for the community and learn the etiquette of the site. Be helpful.
2. Incorporate the site into your content production. If you’re already blogging and tweeting, participating actively in a Q&A site can feel like a burden. Look for ways to incorporate a little time each day on the Q&A site of your choice so you can be present, pay attention and add value. Over the long haul, you’ll find it easier and easier to make the time to contribute, but don’t get carried away and let it dominate your time unless it is proving to be a fruitful outlet.
3. Add to your content sharing. When you blog, find an appropriate way to share that in your profile or in an answer or as a post or update on a Q&A site. Make sure not to use the Q&A site as nothing more than a gateway or traffic driver to your blog or site, but do think of it as an additional place to archive examples of your work.
4. Go narrow, not broad. You can’t be all things to all people. You can’t be a true “expert” in many, many things. Part of building your reputation is knowing who you are, what you can offer others, and then focusing on providing consistent, valuable information. Sure, you can provide the occasional answer to a random topic (for example, I’ve responded to questions about RVing and parenting on Quora) because this shows you’re human and multidimensional. But when building your reputation and your brand, consistency is key.

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The basic idea behind WorkScore is that anyone with a company email address can review their workplace and colleagues. Furthermore, they can do it anonymously, leaving a little more freedom to be truthful about what they think. When reviewing a colleague on WorkScore, a person can document skills, write “thank you” notes and point to specific confirmations on the part of that colleague. Assessments are confidential, meaning that the subject of the assessment does not actually see it, although the information does contribute to an overall “WorkScore.”

While your first reaction to the idea of anonymous assessment may be concern, the subject of any review is able to choose whose assessments count. If you receive an assessment from someone who may not be perfectly objective about your abilities, you can instruct WorkScore to ignore that information.

Your WorkScore provides a clear picture of your skills when you’ve received a little information from your colleagues. You’ll have an overall numerical score that draws on how your co-workers have ranked you in different skills. You can also add any major contributions you’ve made to your employer — a viewer will be able to see whether or not your co-workers have confirmed your contributions.

WorkScore goes beyond just reviewing colleagues, however. You can also review the company you work for, and look through potential companies during your search for a job. All reviews of workplaces are anonymous — although you can’t add a review without an email address from that company — and they’re public. WorkScore focuses on providing information about the values of a particular company, as well as finding a good fit for yourself. You can also review a company as a client, business partner, supplier or other professional who doesn’t actually work for the company.

For web workers, the ability to add confirmation of your skills may be particularly useful. It offers an opportunity to not only tell a prospective employer that you’ve already worked as a telecommuter or independently, but to have your colleagues — perhaps a manager or team lead as well — describe how well you do when you work remotely, and can provide a shortcut to proving that you can work independently in a way that a traditional resume can’t.

It is necessary to get your co-workers on board with using WorkScore to document accomplishments and skills: a social resume just isn’t that useful if other people aren’t involved. Depending on your workplace, getting your colleagues and management on board with using WorkScore to rank each other could be a tough sell. Overall, however, the information that WorkScore could be just what employers need to better judge potential employees.

What do you think of the “social resume” concept?

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It’s an interesting idea, a sort of formalization of the common practice of Googling people. If it becomes popular, the Divvs rating could serve as a quick way to size up potential collaborators and subcontractors. Of course, if it becomes popular, spammers will also try to figure out how to scam it – but we’re a ways off from that point yet. At the moment, it’s at least a fun exercise in comparing your networking level to those of your peers.

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