The Key to Referrals May Be Referralkey

I am going to be honest and apologize ahead of time. This is the heart of Trivia Contest Season (TCS) for me, so this and next week’s post may seem a little truncated. No disrespect to the loyal minions and readers of Indies Unlimited is intended, but we play to win, so we gots to prepare!

Referralkey.com is one of the spammier sites that have been circulating among many indies on staff at IU recently, so I thought I’d take a look at the site. It really seems like a combination of LinkedIn and Klout: A lot of business-related leads generation with the ability to win awards.

I signed up yesterday and didn’t do much else. Then I get an e-mail saying my first “Private Brief” was in. So I went to check that out, only to find that it was a short video tutorial on importing your LinkedIn contacts. So score for first impressions! And if you add enough “colleagues” to your profile (and they accept), you can get “Social Networker” badges. Klout-erific!

The big thing here is to get colleagues to enhance your “sales opportunities.” Once you have a full-fledged colleague, you can spam, err, contact people in his network (and vice versa) and pretty soon you’ve got enough people to start an Amway franchise. You can also post special offers and business points to Facebook and Twitter, which of course necessitates being on Facebook and Twitter so you could do that without bringing Referralkey into the picture.

The most interesting part of the website is watching the leads (read “ads”) that show up in your feed. It appears Referralkey has a preponderance of people selling insurance, Kevlar vests, self-defense training, bail bonds, air-brushed tans, and even holistic psychiatry. There are quite a few folks here who are obviously very earnest in their intentions, like the retired restaurateur looking to do home and garden work, but what the hell is an “Advanced Emotional Freedom Technician”? The possibilities and probabilities for possible scams here are also very great.

Now in the name of science, I tested the “Add Colleagues” feature. It had options for Facebook Friends and/or Twitter followers. So I chose Facebook. But since I like a good portion of the people I have as Facebook friends, I posted that I had done so, in the interests of Internet tact and decorum. Not sure if this skews the results, but nothing happened. I did go in and add a fellow author as a colleague.

I’m sure this might be a valuable tool for some types of salesmen and some types of businesses, but I don’t know how useful it would be to authors. Perhaps if you are interested in putting out there that you can write blogs or essays on numerous topics (or specific ones), it may be a resource worth the time. The same may be true if you are looking for jobs as a freelance writer or editor, but I think there are other more author and content specific resources that might be a better fit for those efforts.

Referralkey.com is an interesting take on combining a bunch of social media aspects, and I’m going to reserve judgment on it. At least until something happens on my profile.