In the process of slowly trying to build a company around the rather vague idea of reputation, we figured that we should secure as many of the social media, web 2.0-ish user accounts with the user name “Repatoo” as we possibly could. At least that way, we(and not someone with malicious intent) would be the ones screwing up our reputation…

We grabbed Skype, all the major IMs, gmail, hotmail, yahoo! mail, as well as twitter accounts. The one that I was th most skeptical about was twitter. Again, acquiring it was a defensive move, but then I began to ponder the actual business value of this short-message update format. I wrote a few tweets and watched them slowly roll down the main screen off into oblivion. Then, while performing my daily web search for all things Repatoo, I found a few of the tweets show up in Google’s search results. OK, so there is some value in it I guess. But, aside from maybe helping boost our organic search results, does it have any other intrinsic business value, or is it just an “in the moment” kind of thing?

I would love to hear some other people’s opinions as to how they have used these kinds of social media sites to help build their companies.

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