Business and Blogging

Managing Identity in a Web 2.0 World - Part 2: ZoomInfo

by Des Walsh on July 31st, 2007

The first post in this two part series took a brief look at the challenge of managing our digital identities - what people see when they find us or our companies online.

Way back in 1999, Sun Microsystem’s Scott McNealy famously said “You have zero privacy…Get over it.”

But “getting over it” does not mean we have to adopt a laissez faire attitude to what is out there, about us, on the Web.

In fact, once smart business owners realize that some version of their identity is very likely to be online, they will take steps to find out more precisely just what information about them, and the businesses they own, is to be found online and then do what is feasible to ensure that the information is accurate and up to date.

To take just one example, information on ZoomInfo.

I learned about ZoomInfo in the course of co-authoring a couple of books about recruiting (LinkedIn for Recruiting and Big Biller). At the basic level it is an “open to all” online tool with which you can search for information about people and companies. There are more powerful products, an Executive version from $99 a month and a Power version “starting as low as $5960 a year”, which enable searchers to go deeper.

Many people I have spoken to recently had not been aware of the site until I mentioned it.

Yet ZoomInfo claims to have information on 34 million people and 3 million companies and is constantly scouring the Internet, whether we are awake or sleeping, gleaning information on all these people, no doubt including many of the readers of this blog post.

ZoomInfo’s website says:

ZoomInfo’s semantic search engine continually crawls the Business Web - the millions of company websites, news feeds and other online sources - and identifies information on people, companies, products, services and industries. ZoomInfo then organizes this information into fresh, comprehensive, objective and easy-to-read profiles.

So how do those profiles get to be “objective”? In the sense, I suppose, that the subjects do not write them.

But each of us has a choice, to either just let the robots manage our identity, or to play a role in how services like ZoomInfo store and display information about us.

At no cost, other than a bit of time, I was able to edit one of the four three links to me as Des Walsh (out of eleven by the same name), plus one under the full version of my first name, Desmond Walsh, and consolidate them so that I can now have one identity on ZoomInfo instead of four (or twelve for that matter).

To establish that it was indeed I who was requesting the changes and integration of the various “identities” of mine, I had to provide credit card details, but the card was not charged. Some people might find that a fairly slim basis on which to establish someone’s identity. Others might be concerned about handing over credit card details. I’m simply reporting what I chose to do, not recommending or encouraging people to do what I did. My sense is that ZoomInfo is a reputable organization and I had no problem personally in providing the information as part of getting the record set straight.

Do you dare not to check what ZoomInfo says about you? Not to mention Google and Yahoo!

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POSTED IN: General, Resources, Search, Social Media, Web 2.0