Managing Corporate Reputation Online Can No Longer Be An Afterthought

It’s amazing to me that as we approach the third decade of the commercial Web that many companies still don’t fully understand the business value and risks of online reputation management. In fact, I would go as far to suggest that most still don’t understand the concept of managing reputation in an increasingly digital world

I recently attended another panel discussion on this topic, entitled “E-Defense” sponsored by Weber Shandwick, a global agency that I worked at for nine years. This was one of the better events on this topic, but even so it didn’t take long for the discussion to slip off topic and dissolve into a larger discussion around the pitfalls of social media.

One of the big challenges it seems for many companies is figuring out how corporate behavior impacts brand perceptions across the increasingly growing Conversation Prism (credit Brian Solis). Time and again, I have seen very smart executives and marketers baffled by the concept of extending successful business practices and principles to new Web communication channels. For whatever reason, some companies feel the need to start from scratch rather than applying previous lessons learned to these new environments.

At the seminar Weber Shandwick and The Economist released a study based on interviews with more than 700 executives called “Risky Business - 15 Realities and 15 Rules for Managing Reputation Online” - designed to address the key challenges companies face today and specific actions that need to be taken. The highlights included:

• Nearly 70% of executives regard their company’s reputation as vulnerable, but they are universal in their belief that non-traditional outlets like blogs are the least important in building corporate reputation;
• Virtually all executives surveyed regard the Web as important in measuring corporate reputation, but almost none of them believe the Internet is crucial when making important business decisions;
• Despite previous surveys that indicate the reputation of the CEO is closely linked to the reputation of the company they work for, very few executives seem to believe that and fewer than 40% have even Googled their own name;
• Most surveyed executives say they utilize the Web more for competitive intelligence than understanding their company’s reputation positioning; and,
• Despite overwhelming shifts in consumer media behavior trends, global executives put much more stock in brand perceptions that appear in mainstream media channels than what’s said about them in online communities.

As any good CEO knows, reputation is the direct result of how a company behaves over many years, but there is a real lack of education and understanding in executive suites around the world about how that methodology has been impacted by the Web.

Mike Spataro