Instead of Writing Your Bio on About.me, Crowdsource It on Everyword.me

Guest Author Jul 6, 2012 Tweet

I don’t know about you, but when I need to write about myself, it takes me hours. (That bio paragraph below took me about an hour to write and I’ve already changed it – twice!) I’m never satisfied with the end result and I always procrastinate because it feels so presumptuous to write about my successes. Still, I find myself forced to do it again and again, on everything from a resume to an About.me page.

Everyword.me is a crowdsourced bio page that aims to help you with that exact problem. Everyword’s founder, Dan Peguine, describes how it all began:

“6 months ago while sitting to write the personal bio for my site’s About Me page I was faced with a dilemma: I asked myself how can I describe myself well when all I have to work with is my own personal perspective? It just doesn’t sound credible, and in my experience almost no one reads it.”

That’s when inspiration struck:

“I said to myself; why not give my friends the option to write my bio for me? It’ll be like a big cocktail party in my honor where everybody shares their thoughts about me with all their friends. When other people describe you it sounds more credible, plus you get the added value of other people getting exposed to your bio!”

Building an Everyword.me page is pretty straightforward: you connect with Facebook, notifying your network about your new page and asking your friends to fill in words that describe you best (in their opinion). The power of the social graph enables them to share their opinion on their timeline, inviting everyone they know to your cocktail party.

Some people might be concerned with getting some negative feedback. Peguine assured me that you can always clean your page from negative feedback. “A word that describes you gets votes from people viewing your page, that way if you have certain expertise or a characteristic that everyone agrees on, it will dominate your page,” he says. (Check out Robert Scoble’s Everyword.me page, for example.)

I personally use my new Everyword.me page on LinkedIn and on my email signature. I’d like to invite you all to help me fill it up and at the same time create one for yourself!

Guest author Haim Pekel is a marketer/entrepreneur and currently the Marketing Director of IQTELL.com, a GTD app that helps users to increase productivity by giving them a platform to organize to-do lists, complete tasks, and connect them to everything they do in one place. Haim also co-founded Retour à L’innocence, Vivre en harmonie avec soi, les autres, la nature magazine. Haim usually writes about startups, marketing, and productivity on Tech Cocktail and IQTELL’s blog. You can find him on IQTELL’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts.