Awards

A few interesting things crossed my mind and desk this week that I thought I would share. All reputation-related of course.

1. The World Economic Forum released its report on the top risks facing the world in 2012. Social unrest and income inequity were at the top. Natural disasters such as the earthquake in Japan were also high on the risk list. And as pointed out, one risk affects another creating a domino effect. “The Internet, meanwhile, can magnify and spread the effects of a disaster in other ways. Rumors, even if incorrect, spread quickly on social networking sites — sometimes more rapidly than emergency services can communicate accurate information. As word of disasters like the terror attacks of Sept. 11 or the earthquake in Japan spreads globally, consumers hunker down in front of their computer screens or televisions, rather than going about their daily lives. This increases the economic effects of a crisis, even in areas far removed from the source.”  Disasters such as the horrific earthquake, tragic 9-11, death-defying financial crisis, massive oil spills and nasty ash clouds coming from Iceland all heighten other risks in some way. And risk spells reputation damage depending on how a company or country responds and solves the problem.

2. The report from WEF also mentioned that risks are on the horizon as leadership transitions are in full force this year. It is not just the U.S. presidential election that poses risk and stirs up emotional angst. There are leadership transitions underway this year in France, Russia and China as well. Add to that the sudden transitions in the Arab world this past year and we see upheaval and uncertainty. When CEO transitions are underway, the first few months can be risky so as we see world leaders change, tighten your seatbelts. The public will be more socially active than ever. We’ve already seen that in Russia.

3. I’ve written here about rankings and so-called “worst of” lists where companies, CEOs and environmental records are put on notice that they are not making the grade. In most Januarys, TripAdvisor.com comes out with its “dirtiest hotels” in the world.  No more. The CEO Stephen Kaufer says, “We want to stay more on the positive side, so we’ll continue to feature the best destinations, the top hotels.  We’re slicing and dicing the ‘best of’ in different ways this year, more than focusing on the negative.”  Although the article where I learned about this says there were potential legal considerations and competitive reasons for abandoning the January list, it also mentioned that the original “worst of” list was done for PR reasons and that TripAdvisor is less interested in that now.  Perhaps there is a reputation-reason afoot here. There is so much negativity online on some of these sites and it is so easy to find what you are looking for that a list of the 10 worst may be hardly worth alienating visitors to your site. Everyone worries about the detractors and the praisers. Maybe it is time to just worry about the average site visitor who does not want snarky comments and lists, but just the plain old straight forward facts to plan a plain old relaxing get-away.

          I think about rankings and scorecards all the time. Afterall, I cut my teeth on Fortune’s Most Admired Companies years back.  At the time, there were not many competing scorecards. And, afterall,  today we have an active rankings practice at Weber Shandwick that we call Scoreboxx. We help companies all the time understand what rankings are important to pursue and which are not worth the time. There is barely a day that I don’t hear about a new scorecard or as I have mentioned in a post I wrote on reputation trends, a newworst-of  list.  In fact, I have started collecting worst-of lists because they fascinate me as much as best-of  lists. Strange hobby but who knows, they could be worth something in the future. Not really.

Today’s New York Times had a fascinating article on the rankings and metrics obsession that we seem to live by.  The writer even predicted how the frenzy will only rise as we enter the serious election campaign. Little did she probably know that the op-ed page in today’s NYT had a chart on how Donald Trump was measuring up as a front runner in several polls as a presidential candidate.  Here are some the quotes from the rankings article that I highlighted for sakekeeping. They go far in explaining our rankings addiction.

“Numbers make intangibles tangible,” said Jonah Lehrer, a journalist and author. “They give the illusion of control.”

“The trouble, though, is when we mindlessly and blindly rely on those numbers to tell us everything,” said Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies of science and technology and director of MIT. “Just because we have the skills and ability to put metrics on everything doesn’t mean we should.”

“This reliance and overweening trust in numbers is to some extent generational,” said Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. “For almost anybody in the United States under the age of 25, the only models are quantifiable rankings,” he said.

 A few comments. I don’t think we can blame everything on the younger generation although Gardner has a point about everything being quantified for them (SATs), so why shouldn’t they apply it everywhere else?  The truth is that all age cohorts use rankings to pick the best restaurant, best travel location, best employer and best college to apply for.  We’re all hooked.

The article also goes into how authors end up measuring themselves by Amazon rankings of books sold.  As the author of two books, people always ask me how many books did you sell? Personally, I have no idea since I wrote the books out of love for my topic, reputation, and much much less for my status on the number of books sold.  However, I sometimes think I am not a very good author because I don’t know the answer to this frequently asked question and I’d be a better person if I at least knew. Despite that, I have to get better at checking Google Analytics to see how many people read my blog. When I have looked at it in the past, I could not figure out whether I should be blogging on Fridays or Mondays or Thursdays and just gave up. I have to get better at this because I don’t know how I fare!

Another element in the article certainly caught my eye. It referred to a blog posting on Online Status Anxiety by Jonah Lehrer who has a new book out on How We Decide.  He is so right. People are obsessed also with the number of followers and fans and likes.  Our social ranking is now quantified.  Yikes. Here is a selection I took out of Jonah Lehrer’s blog posting:

“Now that the social web is maturing – the platforms have been winnowed down to a select few (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) – some interesting commonalities are emerging. The one shared feature that I’m most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn’t just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn’t just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach. LinkedIn has too many damn hierarchies to count. Even the staid blog is all about the metrics, from page views to unique visitors.”

I think I am going to check out my blog postings metrics today! Enough slacking on the metrics. My online reputation should be the measure of my life!

  America’s Most Reputable Companies list is out from Reputation Institute. Just saw an article in PRWeek. And read the RI press release for more detail.  The list also appears in Forbes. In addition to reading about the various companies that made the best and least best (polite way of saying it) reputation list, several interesting facts came out that immediately drew my attention. They are below.

• The survey found companies with excellent reputations were 2.5 times more likely to put their CEO in charge of positioning and telling the corporate story. This is music to my ears. Today, CEOs are the content providers of the highest order. Great to have another source say this besides us.
• Highly-regarded companies are 15 times more likely to manage reputation across company functions. Reputation is of enterprise importance and not just a PR issue. Good point.
• Highly-regarded companies were 1.5 times more likely to include reputation metrics as part of their senior management dashboard, and 1.7 times more likely to seek outside assistance with corporate reputation management.

I was very pleased to see RI asking these questions which only add to the reputation library of information. Thanks to the RI team!

If you are interested in “the order of things,” as Malcolm Gladwell titles his smart article  (subscription required) on college rankings, you will be very keen to read this article appearing in The New Yorker. The central argument is about the validity of the U.S. News rankings criteria and its ability to drive sane university presidents insane. The U.S. News magazine no longer exists but the appetite for these sundry rankings of colleges, law firms and hospitals, and more, is unsatiable.  When the 2011 rankings on the Best Colleges were released, the web site saw more than 10 million visitors that month. As Gladwell says, the head of the rankings team — Robert Morse – sits atop an entire  industry that invented itself. 

Gladwell goes through arguments one by one to point out the arbitrariness involved in picking  the best colleges. He says, “There’s no direct way to measure the quality of an institution–how well a college manages to inform, inspire, and challenge its students. So the U.S. News algorithm relies instead on proxies for quality–and the proxies for educational quality turn out to be flimsy at best.”

Ultimately Gladwell gets to the key point. He quotes Michael Bastedo, an educational sociologist at the University of Michigan, who has spent time analyzing the U.S. News methodology. Bastedo says it simply, “rankings drive reputation.” I could not have said it better — in three words no less. The professor also says, and I wholeheartedly agree, that sometimes rankings do work. He cites two good examples — asking professors in a field to rate others in the field makes perfect sense since they probably read what their peers are writing, saying and doing while training students. Or he says that rankings work when the subjectrequires specialized knowledge such as the Wall Street Journal college rankings based on what corporate recruiters are seeing from graduating seniors looking for jobs.

But as we all know and intuit for the most part, rankings are very subjective and depend on who you are asking, how the attributes are worded, weighted and ordered. Gladwell’s article is a good read because it becomes immediately clear that many variables go into what makes something number one and it is very likely to be not what you are looking for as a filter.

There is no doubt that there is a vicious loop today where rankings drive reputation and reputation drives rankings. Despite this insightful knowledge from Gladwell, we all still have to compete according to the standards and rankings of the day. Alas, have to go and fill out an application for something right now. I might just win.

 Yesterday we released our analysis on where industry-leading CEOs and the most powerful women in business invested their time speaking in 2010. Reputations can be shaped at such top-tier events and company stories can travel the world, if properly socialized. We used to depend on media coverage to get the message out about a speaking platform but with social media at our fingertips today, a speech before 50 people can travel fast to many more influential people than ever imagined. If companies can properly distribute their executives’ speech-making online, they can now realize an even healthier ROI for their executives’ time than ever before. And let’s not forget how much time, resources and energy goes into just one speech or presentation. It is never a walk in the park!

I am going to blog backwards about our findings by starting with what we learned about the most powerful women in business first and get to the industry-leading CEOs later this week.  Like we had in grade school, today is backwards day.

I am quite pleased that we decided to look at the most powerful women in business because this is a small, exclusive club that demands further research in the communications field. Greater demand for female leaders was recently underscored when we learned that the World Economic Forum now requests that 20 percent of this year’s strategic partnership delegates be female. That polite request is sure making the rounds because I see it popping up all over. Despite the small sample size of these most powerful women (alas!), we did learn some interesting trends about what they’ve been doing on the speaking circuit over the past 12 months. And they’ve been busy. Here are some snippets from our analysis:

• This elite group of powerful business women was extremely active on the speaking circuit in 2010. A large eight out of 10 (82 percent) spoke at one or more events in 2010.
• In addition, the average number of events that each woman spoke at in 2010 was 3.2 events, with 11 women having spoken at five or more events.
• The leading speaking forums in 2010 for the most powerful women executives included the World Economic Forum, Fortune Brainstorm: Tech, the Women’s Conference (hosted by former California First Lady Maria Shriver and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), Daily Beast’s Women in the World, and not surprisingly, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit (although not everyone who makes the list is a speaker). However, there was also a wide range of other types of conferences where top women in business spoke such as Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) Annual Conference, Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) Board of Boards, Milken Institute Global Conference, and The Wall Street Journal CEO Council. Micho Spring, our chair of the Global Corporate practice at Weber Shandwick said: “The vast majority of these women leaders are taking their communications and storytelling roles seriously. There are not only many women’s conferences for female leaders, but many other non-gender specific platforms as well.” 
• Leading women executives are out in force.  This is quite a broad range which shows that there is demand for these top executives. The types of conferences can be categorized as follows:

Just as rankings are growing leaps and bounds every year, I see the executive conference business expanding even further.  Companies are shaking off the economic woes from the past two years and getting back on the trail to differentiate their companies, narrate their responsibility and possibly turn back the anti-business wave that has beset so many. Conferences have an untapped way of  validating companies by tacitly endorsing that their executives have something to say that is meaningful and forward-looking about our collective futures. And women execs are clearly doing their part as well.

Scorecards are part of our day-to-day business in building reputation. At Weber Shandwick, we are expert in identifying the right rankings, scorecards, league tables (whatever you might call them) for companies and their leaders. It makes perfect sense to me that vying for the best rankings helps boost reputation. It is but one way to spread the word that your company is worthy of what it is doing. Of course, if you dig too  deep in some of them, you discover flaws. We recently advised a company against issuing a press release on a survey that had fewer than 50 respondents because of its limited sample size and lack of representation. Sometimes you just have to rise above it.

Well, companies are not the only ones to compete for these honors. Countries have caught on as well according to an article I just read. “With investment scarce and jobs even scarcer, countries that sparkle in global league tables can send a powerful signal to investors.”  Countries are in a race to the top of the World Competitivness Index published by IMD, the business school, or the World Bank’s “Doing Business” league tables. Saudi Arabia just made it to the near top (11th place) from 55th place one year ago and Rwanda has moved up from the very very bottom to a more respectable showing. These accolades can go far in convincing investors that a country is business-friendly and investor-worthy.

Turning to company awards, I often talk about rankings fatigue and this article on airline awards in the WSJ nailed it. As it said, “The travel world is overbooked with awards these days, with some two dozen organizations around the world giving out annual awards for the ‘best.’ Each has different selection criteria, different funding and different judging, so they end up with different results.”  That’s alot of applications to fill out and data to provide. This leads me to think that there should be a new corporate title in 2011 — Chief Rankings Officer.

As the new year approaches, I decided to assemble my thoughts on what’s ahead in the world of reputation for 2011. I posted eight trends on HuffingtonPost that I see emerging and taking hold over the next 12 months. You will have to check out the post to see what I said about each (my way of saying please check it out). Here they are.

1. Hijacked Reputations

2. Reputation Recoverers Anonymous

3. Reputation Warfare

4. Online Reputation Revisionism

5. Ascendancy of Social CEOs

6. Reputation Blacklisting

7. Reputation Risk Insurance

8. The Corporate Brand Rises

The original title of the post is Ask the Magic-8 Ball: Reputation Trends for 2011.  HuffingtonPost shortened it to make it more clear (they are right). However, the Magic 8-Ball is a toy that I used to play with when I was little and which is still around. Here is what Wikipedia says about the toy:

The Magic 8 Ball is  a toy used for fortune-telling or seeking advice, manufactured by Mattel. The Magic 8 Ball is a hollow plastic sphere resembling an oversized, black and white 8 ball.  Inside is a cylindrical reservoir containing a white, plastic, icosahedral  floating in alcohol with dissolved dark blue dye. The die is hollow, with openings in each face, allowing the die to fill with fluid, giving the plastic die minimal buoyancy. Each of the 20 faces of the die has an affirmative, negative, or non-committal statement printed on it in raised letters. There is a transparent window on the bottom of the Magic 8 Ball through which these messages can be read.

Ask The Magic 8-Ball is the perfect ending to a difficult year threatened by a poor economy and many unsettled issues that still afflict populations around the world. The question for the Magic 8-Ball is “Will 2011 Be Better than 2010?”  Pick one of  the 20 standard answers below that appear on the Magic 8-Ball for what’s ahead. I picked the fifth one — Outlook GOOD. Happy New Year!

? As I see it, yes

? It is certain

? It is decidedly so

? Most likely

? Outlook good

? Signs point to yes

? Without a doubt

? Yes

? Yes – definitely

? You may rely on it

? Reply hazy, try again

? Ask again later

? Better not tell you now

? Cannot predict now

? Concentrate and ask again

? Don’t count on it

? My reply is no

? My sources say no

? Outlook not so good

? Very doubtful

  Rankings are moving up in this world. I noticed the statement from Fortune in their recent announcement on the World’s Most Admired that they received their best response rate in history. Hmmmm.  After years of falling response rates, what’s the deal here? And this week my colleage told me that the entries for Ethical Corporation Awards were delayed by a few days because of the outsized volume of entries. Is this a trend? Are these rankings rising in importance because what’s better than having an independent third party saying you are #1? There is definitely a trend here worth watching.

*** IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: SHORTLIST DELAYED ***

As a result of the sheer volume of entries for the inaugural Ethical Corporation Awards, we have been forced to delay the announcement of our shortlist.

This announcement will instead take place in the afternoon of Monday 8th March.

  As a reputation watcher who gets daily alerts about reputation, I recently noticed that there are fewer alerts about reputation and its ties to SEO (search engine optimization). It used to be that nearly every alert detailed some article or company on how to maximize your reputation by managing search engines better to help lift your reputation.  I do not know why there has been this decline but perhaps it is a widely known secret that many companies and brands have already mastered. Additionally, social media such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have rendered search engine optimization more complex and harder to control. I am not exactly sure but it has been on my mind. There were moments in time when I thought that reputation had been reduced to SEO tactics so I am much relieved that my favorite topic is broadening and not narrowing. My next observation is that “personal branding” has become a major theme in the reputation space.

Lately there has been alot of requests for more information on thought leadership. One of the questions I like to ask a company leadership is …what is their “moon shot?” Today I read something that made me think of another question to ask: What’s your oxygen? What is absolutely necessary for you to breathe and thrive in the years ahead?

I am wondering if there are just too many awards out there.  Several major ones were released this week. Are awards becoming commoditized because there are so many? Hard to say but they sure are “good and plenty.” (That’s an expression from years ago. You may not be familiar with it.)

Next week I am speaking at a conference on What CEOs are Talking About Now. More to come.