Feb
The online marketing and professional networking website known as Ziggs.com (which we mentioned some time back – noting it as a tool that might help you control your online presence) boasts a seemingly useful feature in that it sends you an email update each time someone views your profile page on Ziggs.com.
But after using Ziggs for a few months I’m honestly not seeing any compelling reason to continue receiving these updates…except for maybe the occasional ego boost.
When I first signed up for the service I got a number of these email updates that informed me people had viewed my Ziggs profile, and that they had searched for terms like “Jeremy Reither” or “R3R.” The update emails also include information about the approximate location (city and state (or country)) where the searcher was located. Interesting? Initially, maybe. Useful? No, not really.
After the first few times these emails become a distraction at best. I mean do you really need to know each time someone views your profile on Ziggs – in real time? On top of that, over the last couple months, the information contained in my updates has become less complete. The most interesting part of the update – the search terms used – have been replaced with a notation that the searcher didn’t use “any relevant search terms.” Plus a large percentage of my upates are notifying me that people in the Netherlands are viewing my profile. Here’s an email I received today:
—–Original Message—–
From: Ziggs [mailto: support@ziggs.com ]
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2009 4:12 AM
To: Reither, Jeremy
Subject: Ziggs Real-Time Search Alert
To: Jeremy Reither
Company: R3R
To keep you informed each time an Internet searcher views your online profile, Ziggs automatically provides the following real-time data about the most recent visitor to your profile:
Search Engine: Ziggs
Search Terms: No specific terms used
Referrer: None
Visitor Location: Eindhoven, Netherlands
Date: February 13, 2009
Time: 7:12 AM EST
Nothing against Netherlands. I mean Amsterdam is great and all, and I’m sure Eindhoven is, too. But Ziggs, why should I care about this? What I should care about is not how many people are viewing my profile on Ziggs.com, but how many of them are clicking through to view my business website. But as soon as that happens I’m able to track those visitors using our website analytics…so it kinda takes Ziggs out of the loop.
To Ziggs’ credit, they probably created this feature as a ‘hook’ to get people to sign up for their service (like I did), and to that end I’m sure it worked in getting them a number of subscribers. But the tiny ego boost that someone might get from being notified that someone else is searching for their name and/or company name hardly seems like enough to keep them enrolled in the service…or in my case even interest me enough to explore the rest of the Ziggs service offerings.
