Mego: Excellent Business Tool but Stuck in High School

I came across a service that, at first glance, seemed like a fun little avatar creation site. And it is that, but I think it’ could be much more. Called Mego, the site lets you create a mobile calling card that can be placed on various sites across the internet. Before I tell you about it, let me show you. Here is my Mego profile/avatar:




Clicking on the little icons will bring up different information about me, my work and other interests. As you can see if you click around a bit, I can include RSS. And that is why I am posting about this fun tool that is clearly geared toward teens. I believe, with just a bit of tweaking, the folks at Mego could create a very serious business application. Everything is there, just waiting to be made into a small, yet all-inclusive digital business card.

Very quickly, I will go over the design of the site and the wizard you use to design your profile. It’s built in flash. Completely. I generally don’t have a problem with this, but for some reason it made the creation process drag for me. Each step in the set-up took awhile to load and usually my broadband is click-and-it’s-there.

There are four steps in the design process. During the first step, you choose the visual appearance of your Mego character. Basically, you pick a body outline you like, hair and then choose from many funky backgrounds and animations. These type of visuals seriously detract from the, well, seriousness of the avatar. If they had a few more basic choices it would be better suited to using Mego as a business tool. Since I couldn’t find anything work-appropriate, I chose one of the more outlandish themes. It is called 70s Flashback. Nice, huh?

The second step is where you write up your profile. This is standard although, for some reason, Mego does this schticky thing where each piece of your profile corresponds to a certain area of the body. It doesn’t make any sense and the metaphor isn’t really explained or carried further in any way. Oh well. You have the standard profile text box, but Mego also includes a ton of other sections where you can add personal info. There is Education & Work, Sports & Leisure, Food & Drink … sounds almost like Trivial Pursuit. You can choose to fill in all, part or none of this information.

For example, if I was going to use Mego for business purposes right now, I would not complete the Personality & Style section because, rather that including ideal work situations or whether you prefer team or solo work, this section is more about horoscopes and what’s “hot or not.” I would obviously complete the work and education section. And I would consider completing the Bookmarks section so I can be easily found on other social networks and sites.

In the third step, you add your entire digital life, basically. You can include photos, Amazon wishlists, del.icio.us links and, most importantly, RSS feeds. In fact, you can have one RSS feed for each of the twelve parts of the body. That, my friends, is a nice bit of linkage and networking. It is exactly what I believe could turn Mego into a very helpful and far-reaching business tool.

Fourth and finally, you get to add your Mego avatar to various social networks, blogs, etc. For my avatar above, I just copied the code and pasted it. Very easy. This opens up even more possibilities when it comes to list building, link building and traffic generation.

Is Mego going to be something I use for business purposes right now? Not likely. However, it has the potential to be a very cool and thorough means of passing along everything a client, prospect or employer would need to know. In fact, for it to be perfect for business, only a few changes would need to be made. If they ditched the frilly backgrounds and animations, switched up some of the profile category information and perhaps made the set-up process a bit less over-designed, I would use my Mego avatar virtually everywhere I went … or at least everywhere I went virtually.

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