Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Vanno.com Review


Vanno.com describes itself as the company reputation index.. At first it seems like just another Digg.com clone. I've seen alot of the these and even once tried to make my own. Most of them are miserable failures. But, I see alot of potential in Vanno.com. The think that make it different is that it actually uses the submitted news to create company profiles. These company profiles provide a bunch of interesting information. It has stats about employee political contributions, community involvement, employee satisfaction, and even patriotism. Yes, patriotism. I was a little concerned about this one, but my concerns where relived when I check the factors they use to calculate patriotism. It seems to be based on country of origin, unions, and employment of military veterans. These things seem to be quite reasonable factors in determining the patriotism of a company. I decided to take a look at a few companies I'm very familiar with to get an idea of the sites accuracy.
First off was Target. I worked for Target for about 6 years and I shopped there about once a week. Nothing on Vanno.com company profile page would surprise anyone who shops there. Community involvement is high, but thats probably just because of Target philanthropic giving. The customer satisfaction is also high. I think most people would agree with that. The fishy thing is that I would guess the satisfaction would be almost entirely from value and price. After all Target is legendary for is poor customer service. But Vanno.com give Target a 60 out of 100 for customer service. Also it seems that the stats for quality and product safety are wacky. I shop at Target because I know that I can quality for a better price. Target does not sell unsafe products, but just visit the customer service counter and take a look at all the product recall notices. As for employee satisfaction Vanno.com gives the company a score of 33 out of 100. I would just point to to one of the various Target Sucks pages out on the Internets. Like this One. On to patriotism. The biggest problem with Vanno is that it does not seem to allow negative scores. The patriotism stat is based on union made, country of origin, and apparently the employment of veterans. I can not speak about the Targets treatment of veterans, but I have heard of Target running into problem with USERRA. I think that there was a lawsuit in Oregon about this a few years ago. Aside from that, Target actively fights unionisation of its stores. The product it sells are almost entirely made over seas by none union labour. It seem that on the union stat the score should be a negative. I'm confused by how a retailers patriotism could be influenced by its county of origin, when most of its products are made in China. I should explain that my criticism of Vanno.com's profile of Target was to illustrate the difference between the computer generated profile and reality.
Despite my criticism I think that the Vanno.com company profile of Target is fairly accurate.

Next up is REI. I've been shopping at REI for as long as I can remember. I love the store. Vanno.com profile of REI is pretty good. I would have guessed that customer satisfaction would be much higher. But everything looks quite reasonable.

I would recommend Vanno.com for anyone doing research on a company. Maybe you want to know what other people think. Maybe you are researching a possible future employer. Or maybe you are just curious. I just wonder if enough users will contribute news and vote. If people come to view the profiles will they really stay, register, and vote. Only time will tell.
Check out Vanno.com and see a glimpse of Web 3.0.

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