News reached Reputation Online last week about the launch of Profiled.com, positioned as a ‘go-to resource for senior business executives to present, manage and monitor their professional reputations online’.

This kind of thing is right up our street, as it plays on the idea that building a good reputation offline (which may have taken a number of years) can be destroyed in a matter of seconds by anyone with a fake email address and the desire to steal an identity.

It isn’t the first site to do this, you can go to Crederity and get your Twitter account verified, or secure a Facebook ‘vanity’ URL. Both services you pay for, but Profiled.com is a much more comprehensive offering with heavyweights like Alistair Campbell lending his name to the launch. The site also uses the same criteria as the Law Society to confirm the identity of all members, which adds an amount of credibility to the verification processes put in place.

Aimed at business users, the site is similar to LinkedIn in a sense that you can build a certified resume of achievements, as well as use the in-built contextual search engine that crawls the web for ‘articles about members, notifying you of the results’ – much like Google alerts. This basically means that you get sent mentions of your name, that you can edit (if incorrect) or respond to (if negative) as necessary.

Feedback from Steve Wainwright, chief executive and founder of Profiled.com, on the comparison to LinkedIn is that his site is a dedicated resource for profile management. “Alternative sites are used for networking and also recruitment. The feedback from research that was conducted on behalf of Profiled.com showed that senior level executives did not want to share their network of contacts – essentially, their personal equity – with the rest of the online community.”

The site will be launching functionality that will allow organisations as well as individuals to use the site. It’s not clear how this will work just yet, but if it takes the shape of an online directory of articles, employee profiles and coverage to direct potential customers, press or investors to, it could be where Profiled.com really comes into its own.

Though there’s definitely value in verifying the information that’s being put out there about a ‘business leader’, most executives want to cut down on the amount of networks, services and profiles they create. In many ways, this is another thing to sign up to, pay, and remember a password for. Maybe the real potential is for PR consultants to use this to manage reputation on behalf of a client, but for the time being, we need a little more convincing of its status as a ‘must have’.