If there's one thing I just love about the internet, it's all the hype that some companies are able to latch on to when it comes to 'innovative' business ideas.
Take, for example, a company that will clean up your online profile - in order to help you land that dream job. Of course, they'll do it for a fee:
For about $30 a month, clients can have them do a cleanup, which involves ensuring that all links to, for example, a college kegstand on Facebook.com or a disparaging blog entry from a former partner, will not appear during an online search.
Only, anyone with a brain knows that these claims are all crap. Let's think this through: I have a picture of you with... a goat, posted on one of my sites with your name plastered all over the caption. For $30 they'll somehow come to MY site and get rid of that picture. Wow, these guys ARE l33t.
More importantly though, was another revelation that people just use this service (for $10/month) merely to check up on their profiles:
"More than half of my clients use us just to search and don't even ask us to clean anything up," the company's chief executive and founder Michael Fertik, 28, told Reuters.
Damn! Now that IS impressive. Squeezing $10/month out of people because they're too stupid type their own name into Google sounds like an awesome business opportunity. You could sell those people virtually anything if you've already got them on the hook for $120/year.
And my favorite:
Using proprietary technology, company founder Rob Russo said DefendMyName creates links to promotional sites and blogs on clients in order to bury negative search engine results.
I'm feeling entrepreneurial. I think I'll start a company called LyingCandidates.com. Then I'll use 'proprietary technology' to Google their names, and then see how many links to the candidate's name come from spam-tastic sites owned by DefendMyName.com...
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