AboutOurWork: About.me Meets LinkedIn

We’ve already introduced you to Centrally, a service similar to About.me, but catering to businesses, rather than individuals. AboutOurWork is a new service which aims to do the same thing, but throws a few extra features into the mix.

While Centrally offers most of the same features as AboutOurWork – allowing users to create a profile page with links to a company’s Web presence, themes to choose from, and analytics to find out more about how often visitors land on your page, it goes a couple of significant steps further.

AboutOurWork’s aim is not to just give startups and businesses a way to advertise themselves, but also aims to be a social network where they can connect.

Getting your AboutOurWork page set up is incredibly easy, completed using a step-by-step wizard, in which you can enter your company bio, links to your online and social accounts, select from 5 themes, customize and publish it. The themes include a minimal theme, a portfolio theme in which you can add 8 photos of your choice, and an About.me-like theme where you can choose one large image as the background, among a few others.

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Now the big question is, will businesses actually want to add yet another social network to their list of logins? While the features and themes that AboutOurWork offers are really cool, we wonder – is there enough pull for small businesses and startups who are already devoting time to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+?

There are a few reasons we think the answer might be yes. Most of the social networks that businesses are already on make it easy to connect with the customer. The way that AboutOurWork is built makes it easy to find other businesses to collaborate with, based on existing connections and tags.

AboutOurWork’s most important feature is that it makes it very easy for companies to find each other and connect, and could become a way to encourage more symbiotic relationships amongst small businesses.

When creating a business profile you are given the chance to include specific details and as many tags as you want, making it easy for the right people to find you, much like you do as a professional individual on LinkedIn. Another LinkedIn-like feature is the ability to see what connections you have in common with any other business, giving users a quick and visual way to determine whether or not there is potential to collaborate with another company.

AboutOurWork’s directory makes it easy to search for and find businesses that are already showcasing their work on the site using names, tags, locations and more. A built-in invite system makes it easy to get more businesses onto the work with a quick email.

So why not just use LinkedIn? First of all, small businesses are able to showcase their work in a far more visually appealing manner on AboutOurWork. LinkedIn profiles were not designed with this purpose in mind, and so leave a lot to be desired. Second of all, AboutOurWork was built purely with this concept in mind – to make it easy for small businesses to connect, so since it’s doing just one thing, you expect it to do it well. And it does.

Because of the diversity of the themes, AboutOurWork can be used by any kind of business, and could even be put to good use by freelancers, used to showcase their work, while also making it a great way for them to connect with agencies and companies on the network. The service is flexible enough to allow users to use it exactly the way they choose.

To find out more about AboutOurWork check out their promotional video below:

Are you going to create an AboutOurWork page for your startup or business? Let us know in the comments.