Managing Your Professional Reputation on Unvarnished

Unvarnished is an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation through community-contributed professional reviews. The site lets people give credit where credit is due, and feedback where it's needed most. Most importantly, the site is structured as a resource where the interests of profile owners, reviewers, and review readers are all looked after, and fairly balanced.

Below we get into more detail regarding how we approach professional reputation, and what individuals can do to manage their professional reputation on the site.

Unvarnished facilitates a community-surfaced approach to professional reputation. By providing a neutral venue in which professionals can comment on the performance of other professionals, Unvarnished allows the community to surface and establish the reputation of a given professional...just as in the offline world.

At the same time, Unvarnished provides tools for professionals to claim their profiles, and proactively manage their professional reputation.

Lastly, Unvarnished helps review readers differentiate between more and less useful reviews through the surfacing of reviewer reputation, and community voting on reviews.

An Unvarnished profile is a professional profile where reviews for a given business professional reside. An individual, Pete, can create a profile for himself, or, someone else can create one for Pete, and review it. Pete can later claim that profile made for him, even if someone else made it. Kind of like how you can add a restaurant to Yelp, in order to review it, and the restaurant owner can later come and claim it.

Unvarnished reviews are assessments of professional performance. To help reviewers to be more evenhanded and nuanced in their reviews, without fear of consequences, Unvarnished obscures the identity of reviewers.

At the same time, reviewers, while not identified, do have identity and a reputation on the site, and gain authority over time through their highly-voted reviews and the creation of recognizable patterns within their professional network. All you need in order to leave a review is an Unvarnished account--which you create via Facebook Connect.

Unvarnished works through the participation of the community in surfacing professional reputation. This is true in the case of reviewers fairly and candidly reviewing people they have worked with. This is true in case of profile owners encouraging trusted friends and colleagues to review them. And this is true in the case of review readers voting on reviews as helpful and not helpful, and leaving reviews themselves. Community participation on all sides makes Unvarnished work.

Unvarnished provides a variety of tools to help professionals get the most out of the site, and proactively build and manage their professional reputation.

Unvarnished takes the fairness and balance of the community very seriously, including the professionalism of the content, but also the desires of profile owners, reviewers, and review readers alike. As such, Unvarnished has an abuse reporting process for reporting abusive content that runs afoul of Unvarnished's Terms of Use and Community Guidelines.

However, it is important to remember that one person's opinion can be viewed by another person as abuse. Because of this, Unvarnished will not engage in moderating content that are matters of subjective opinion. Again, Unvarnished is a neutral venue in which professionals share their professional knowledge and opinion about other professionals.

Unvarnished provides tools, spoken to above, that help profile owners actively engage in, and build their professional reputations through responding to reviews and requesting reviews from colleagues who know them best. And Unvarnished provides tools for the community appropriately rate content that is not reality-based, and leave reviews of their own to counteract reviews they disagree with.

However, in the case where someone believes they are being libeled on the site, steps can be taken to address the situation on a case by case basis.

Libel is a very specific, legally-defined, condition, in which a provably false statement is being passed off as fact. For example, saying that someone "stole laptops from the office," when they did not, is a good example. Saying that someone is "not a very good product manager" is not. That is an opinion.

Charges of libel are a serious matter. Even moreso in situations where it is not the case. Many states in the United States have Anti-SLAPP legislation on the books that provides for stiff penalties in situations where charges of libel are brought in cases where the supposed "libeler" is engaging in public participation of their right to free speech.

Please be sure that you are aware of the legal landscape in your jurisdiction before taking specific legal action.

Under the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 Unvarnished is a "provider of an interactive computer service" and as such cannot be treated as the "speaker" of information on the site provided by another information content provider.

If, even in light of the above, you feel that there is content on the site that may be legally actionable, please email