Today, telonu launched the public beta of their service, a community site where users can talk about their employer anonymously. The site mixes reviews and ratings of companies with networking features. From their press release:
Telonu Inc. today announced the beta launch of its free user generated content community website, www.telonu.com focused on the workplace. Users gain valuable insight to what insiders are saying about a company. In turn, they can share what’s on their mind regarding the workplace, the people they work with and other important things in their lives, such as schools, brands purchased, and even what’s hot for lunch!
The Upside
When looking for a new job, it’s hard to find out what a prospective employer is actually all about. Every company talks about their “culture”, but how can you get an objective opinion about working at a company until you actually work there? Telonu tries to tackle this problem by having employees anonymously post opinions about their employer.
Taking a look at a review of Citigroup I see this:
Go to an ivy league undergrad — work on the Street — Go back to a top tier Business School — get lured into Citi bank thinking that you will climb up the corporate ladder faster as you have a combination of people savyy and financial engineering smarts picked up at B School — and then get laid off. This is the story of hot shots at Citi and others — not to mention our friends at Bear and Lehman … this is a white color top tier recession — that we have never seen
On the other end of the spectrum there are posts like this one about myspace:
I was at a party recently in the bay Area and there were some facebook employees there. I was just amazed at the fact that they believed that Facebook was larger than MySpace. We are far better than facebook, have a lot more users and also make tons more $ — guys — get over it!
The Downside
While it’s easy to see that there could be value in a site that gives a real, insider’s look at a company, there are some drawbacks:
1. Authentication- Since the foundation of telonu is built on anonymity, there’s nothing to prevent a user from signing on to the service and pretending to be an employee of a company. For instance, if I have a competitor I don’t like, I could post a negative review and say I work at the company.
2. Spam- On the other hand, employees of companies can use telonu to talk about how great they are, using it as a spam vehicle.
3. Motivation- The one question that comes to mind is: why would someone take the time to review a company unless they’re extremely unsatisfied (as can be seen with people posting layoff notices) or are using the service as a marketing channel.
4. Anonymous Slander– Aside from rating companies, users can also rate and comment on individual employees. And since the users are anonymous and are not authenticated, anyone can say they work with anyone else and call them a big fat jerk.
Have a look at the site here and let me know what you think. Would you use telonu when researching a company? Is the system too open to manipulation?
