Tavistock Chamber of Commerce kicks off with its 1st business networking event

Does asking for a rating, an endorsement or a testimonial devalue the whole idea?

Late last year, I let my Ecademy membership lapse.  Why?  Firstly, because I’d learned myself how to get the Google positioning that Ecademy offered via its blogs and profiles. Secondly, because I’d never got any actual work directly or indirectly from being active on it.  Thirdly because I’d got fed up being repeatedly spammed by Ecademy members – particularly Black Stars.

Fourthly (this is turning into quite a list, isn’t it? – but you’ll notice, Ecademy, I spared naming you in the title and h3 tag) – I got fed up of people asking to be connected, to be rated and for a testimonial – even though I’d never heard of most of them, far less bought anything from them.

Today, I joined ‘WeCanDO Biz’ – out of curiousity.  It’s an online directory / network I looked in on when it started sometime last year and was pretty underwhelmed.  About the only thing that raised my interest level a fraction was that users have a ‘I need….’ status feed (a bit like Facebook).  Could be handy – if it wasn’t full of people saying “I need… introductions to more customers” and such like.

It also has ‘endorsements’ – the idea being that you get reviewed and endorsed by your customers (bringing them into the network at the same time).  Nice in principle.

Two things happened.  First, I noticed the ‘No negative feedback’ approach. Ah, so only positive reviews then, or silence.

The second was that as soon as I joined, someone from a forum I’ve signed up for appeared with a request that I give them an endorsement.

Do you think that asking for an endorsement is wrong?

What would make an online endorsement carry the most weight for you?