I attended a conference this week on Social Reputation (I mentioned in my last post). A social media expert from Pitney Bowes discussed how the company jumped into the social media fray. She made an interesting statement which was well-Tweeted. She said that being a B2B company made it particularly hard to get messages across and that companies needed to humanize themselves. She then said that one learning from the work they are doing is that no one wants to talk to a logo. She is sure right on that count. Companies need to be good storytellers if they want to improve their reputations, especially in the social media space. They should try not to Twitter in corporate messages but in conversational tones. In the same vein, a communications director from Microsoft said that the 4th estate is important but people also want to hear directly from companies. Possibly this is why Twitter has revolutionized corporate engagement.

On a similar topic, I ran across this article this morning in TechCrunch that says that a Yelp-like product is coming very soon that allows people to rate each other’s reputations anonymously. Just what we need. Anonymous raters telling the world about each other’s discretions and stupid moments. Will be curious to see what this is but I do not have high hopes when it comes to anonymous reputation drive-bys. I am hoping that people show some restraint.