The Unvarnished team has been hard at work since our last big release. Today we’re happy to announce two big features that pursue the joint goals of making it easier for Unvarnished users to share their opinions about other professionals, while better helping the Unvarnished community to validate, moderate, and reward great new reviews as they come onto the site.
Network Quick Reviews
Network Quick Reviews are another step towards our goal of helping surface offline, currently-inaccessible information about professional performance.
By making it quick, easy, and even fun for community members to contribute their opinions about professionals in their network, Network Quick Reviews lowers the threshold to bringing this extremely important–but currently extremely hard to access–professional reputation information online, giving credit where credit is due, feedback where needed, and providing a level of accessibility and transparency to professional reputation that has been sorely missing to date.
Try Network Quick Reviews here.
Profile Following
Profile following makes it easy for Unvarnished community members to stay in the loop on new reviews of professionals they care about.
By creating a follower relationship with a given profile, either by reviewing it, manually following it, amongst other ways, Unvarnished community members get a configurable biweekly digest of new reviews on the site for their followed profiles, where they can read, vote on, and even leave reviews themselves.
Ensuring that many eyes see and vote on new reviews that come onto the site rewards high quality reviewing behavior, and helps the community better continue the site’s professional and productive tone, and ultimately, the value of the site as a resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation.
On behalf of the team, we hope you enjoy the new features, and look forward to your feedback. There are some FAQs for the new features below.
- Network Quick Review FAQ
- What is Network Quick Reviews?Network Quick Reviews is a quick, easy, and fun way for Unvarnished community members to surface their opinions about professionals in their network.What’s the goal of this feature?
Unvarnished is focused on helping surface onto the web professional reputation information that already exists in the offline world, stuck in the brains of all of our colleagues, vendors, customers, partners, and so on. One way to help that information surface is to make it as easy and painless as possible to do so. Network Quick Reviews helps lower the already-low barrier to contribution by our community members.
Why only star ratings?
Actually, standard reviews on Unvarnished only require a star rating. It goes back to our belief that it’s important to empower broad participation by the dozens and dozens of people we work with, day in and out, whose opinions, all together, constitute our professional reputation. Allowing our users to quickly flip through a few dozen colleagues signifying how they would recommend or not recommend them, via star ratings pursues that goal. That said, while a star rating is all that is required, but we make it very easy for a user to easily add more details.
What happens when I submit a star rating?
When you submit a star rating, a review is created for the professional you were reviewing, just as if you were on their profile, and reviewed them from there. Reviews submitted via Network Quick Reviews are no different than standard reviews, and enjoy the same benefits of protected reviewer identity, along with being subject to the same community moderation features as all other reviews.
How do you determine what profiles to show me?
Network Quick Reviews uses the same “People You Might Know” algorithm that powers your home page, and other places on the site that show you profiles that we think you might know. The “PYMK” algorithm is based on a variety of factors based on site activity. If there are profiles in the list that don’t make sense, you can tell us by noting that you “Don’t know the person” or “Haven’t worked with them enough” to review them, and we won’t show you their profile anymore. This will also help the list get better over time, along with your reviewing activity, which is considered in regenerating your list.
Don’t star-only ratings not provide much information?
True, a single star rating by itself may not provide deep information. However, dozens and dozens, taken together about a given professional do indeed provide good information, just like many small gestures on Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare, Amazon, and other sites help people make better decisions. Furthermore, the star rating is just the beginning. By creating that link in the system, a reviewer can come back later and flesh out their review.
Where can I see these reviews I leave?
The best place to see the reviews you’ve left is on your Dashboard, in the “Reviews I’ve Left Tab”. And you can of course see the reviews you’ve left on the profiles that you’ve reviewed.
How do I keep this overlay from showing up?
You can dismiss the Network Quick Reviews overlay by clicking the “close” x on the overlay.
How do I get the Network Quick Reviews overlay to come back?
The Network Quick Reviews overlay appears every week to show you new profiles in your PYMK list. And you can invoke it at any time by clicking the “Review your network” button on your home page.
- Profile Following FAQ
- What is Profile Following?Profile Following is a way to stay in the loop on what’s being said about professionals that you care about, while helping the community police and reward great behavior on the site.What’s the goal of this feature?
The goal of Profile Following is to make it easy for community members to easily stay in the loop on what is being said about people they are interested in. And by ensuring that new reviews that come onto the site go in front of many interested eyes, each of which can vote on, moderate, and validate the content, the quality of reviews is protected and rewarded.
How do you determine who I’m “following”?
You follow profiles on the site based on a few relationships you may have with the profile in question, based on either imported information or actions you take on the site. Profiles that you’ve reviewed, that you’ve requested a review from, that you’re Facebook friends with are all examples. Further, you can explicitly select to “follow” a profile from the profile page in question.
Can I follow someone without reviewing them or being their Facebook friend?
Yes. You can “manually” follow a profile by going to the profile page in question, and clicking the “Follow reviews” link.
Where do I see who I’m following?
You can see which profiles you’re following in your settings page, here.
Can I configure who I get emails about?
Yes, you can decide to stop following reviews for profiles either from the settings page, or from the profile page of the person you want to stop following.
Can I change the frequency of my profile following email digests?
Currently the review digest is sent biweekly.
Will profile owners know I’m following them?
To the extent that you have taken a visible action that would qualify you for following a profile (e.g., you requested a review from the profile owner, or the profile owner requested a review from you), the profile owner would know a follower relationship was created. However, a profile owner cannot see the sum total of who is following them, nor what users who are following them through private actions, like reviewing, or manually following.
How can I find out who’s following my profile?
The converse of the above is that you, as a profile owner, only know who is following your profile based on public actions (review requests), but do not know who is following your profile as a result private actions, like reviewing your profile, or even manually following it.
Can I modify the kinds of reviews I get emails about?
Yes, you can modify your following settings such that you get all reviews, reviews with only descriptions, or or no reviews at all, for a given profile you’re following.
How do I turn this off?
You can turn this off in your settings page by turning all groups to “Do not include any reviews”.
[...] on presenting relevant reviews to our users in an easily discoverable way—whether through the Review Update Digest , home page, or other part of the site—and making it easy to pass judgment on those reviews by [...]