Is “claim your profile” a good strategy?

Question

I wanted to get an idea on what the community thinks of the claim your profile strategy for a way to gain user-base. What's good or bad about it?

rubidium · Accepted Answer

You mean like what the sketchy reputation websites have? Or dark pattern home listing sites? Or pump and dump academia “social networks”?
It’ll burn any goodwill you have in my book.
No one wants to know you sucked up info about them and then compiled it all into a shadow profile. And it’s practically blackmail to make them claim it to correct your errors.
If you’re in the B2B space it may be different.

robbya · Answer

I'm not familiar with that strategy (can you define it?), but I'd expect that certain strategies work better for some products but poorly for others. What market are you thinking about?