Awards

The New York Times had a very interesting article yesterday for a variety of reasons. But one reason that hit the spot was about how consumers make decisions and how the author went about choosing the right baby formula for his infant. After he and his wife researched every possible formula on the market and found that they were all basically the same, he came to this conclusion:

"Despite knowing this, I still insist on paying twice as much for Enfamil, which its maker claims is “scientifically designed.” (Aren’t they all?) I splurge because Mead Johnson is a 107-year-old company that has been promoting a single baby-formula brand for more than 50 years. I figure that it’s less likely to squander its name by skirting the rules or engaging in shoddy manufacturing than a company with less to lose. This peace of mind costs me about $7 per day."

This is emblematic of our research on how the company behind the brand matters more than ever. The author was reassured in his purchase of Enfamil because he learned that the company behind it, Mead Johnson, had been around long enough that they were not going to risk their century-old reputation by messing around with the manufacturing and production of  its baby formula.  The parent company made a significant difference in a confirming to the writer that this was the better buy, even at a premium. And not only did this infant get to taste Enfamil but the writer blasted his choice around the world. There you go for serendipity public relations. After reading this gem which was fairly upfront in the article, I kept reading.  The Enfamil example led into the article's main message which is that information overload is plaguing us all and making it increasingly hard to find what we are looking for unless we want to devote days to researching.  "Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information."  Therefore to deal with this information smog, people need guides orsherpas to guide their way through the data chaos. According to the author, "economists have a name for these cues that companies employ to convey their hidden strength: signaling." Reputation-building uses the strategy of signaling.  Good reputations serve as a shorthand to identify whom you want to buy from. A company that is a best place to work for or most sustainable or trains its leaders best helps to narrow the choices between products. Do I want to buy my infant formula from a company that treats its people right? You bet.  The thinking goes like this: if they treat their employees well,you can make the leap that they turn out safe products.  In our research on parent brands, we had an open-ended question on why the parent company mattered when buying a product brand. Over and over, consumers mentioned that knowing the parent brand helped them sort out which products to buy. For example, one consumer said: "The integrity of a company will ultimately show in its products." The article also made me think about anniversary celebrations. Many companies make a big deal about how long they have been in busines -- 50, 100 or 200 years. It turns out that it is good to do so in order to remind consumers and other stakeholders that there's alot of reputational equity behind those promises.

The premier list for CEOs....Barron's World's Best CEOs list came out this weekend. Although you have to have a subscription to the magazine, I can tell you a few things. Number One -- this is a very hard list to get on. CEOs have to have been on the job for at least three years (although they actually prefer five years) to show the impact that a CEO has on a large company. They have to have market values of at least $5 billion and the list is global  (Eighteen CEOs come from the U.S., seven from Europe, three from Asia, and one each from Australia and Canada.)  Every year they have a different slant to how they choose their CEOs. This year they applied the Warren Buffet rule:

"As Warren Buffett sees it, the best CEOs always think like business owners. What he means is that great leaders combine passion, commitment, creativity, and an entrepreneurial drive. That mix isn't easy to find, but Buffett definitely is onto something. So, as Barron's drew up its annual list of the 30 best CEOs around the world, we looked hard for ownership mentalities."

 Many of the usual suspects are on the list such as Jamie Dimon, Howard Schultz, David Novak, Larry Fink, Paul Otellini, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Peter Loscher and others (including Buffett).

What I particularly liked about the article besides giving CEOs their fair due was the close to the article. They humbly said:

"If you think we put the wrong people on the list or want to make a suggestion for next year, please write to editors@barrons.com. We take advice seriously."

I think that is a great way to solicit opinion. It makes you feel comfortable about taking them up on their offer, in fact.  Impressive.

Each year Fortune publishes the 100 Best Companies to Work For in the U.S.   While the bulk of the company evaluation rests on a comprehensive employee survey, Fortune publishes a wealth of employer statistics about benefits, diversity and jobs. Weber Shandwick has been cataloguing this data since 2006, enabling us to look at how each factor changes over time.

Consistent with the improving job market in the U.S., the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For listing reflects some uptick in the areas of diversity and job statistics. While all of these Best Companies tend to offer a variety of perks to their employees, the number of these employers offering such perks have either plateaued or dwindled. Below are insights into some of these trends.

Jobs

The average Best Company enjoyed its highest job growth rate since 2008 (9%). 2010 and 2011 were bleak years, with growth of just 1% and 2%, respectively. Even more gratifying to report is that the number of companies with negative job growth is at its lowest level since 2009 (11%) when Fortune began providing job growth for all listed companies.  It had been as high as 45% in 2011. While there may be a self-selection factor in this, i.e., companies that experienced very high attrition simply didn’t enter into the list competition this year, it does mean that layoffs do not preclude a company from making it onto this important list. Perhaps, it is the way in which these companies manage their layoffs from a communications and operations perspective that result in their employees voting them onto the list. In fact, only 19% of these highly regarded companies have never had a layoff.

 

An interesting statistic that we assessed this year for the first time is the number of applicants per job opening. We went back to 2010 to see how this has changed, and change it certainly did! In 2012, the average number of applicants per job opening is 312 vs. 83 in 2010. Most likely this is a reflection of an improving job market (employees once cautious to leave stable jobs simply weren’t applying for new jobs), or it may show the effects of the good reputations of these particular companies. (And of course it may reflect the number of people looking for jobs in general but we’d expect the figures in 2010 and 2011 to be more equal.)

 

Diversity

While the average percent of women and of minorities in Best Companies do not show any gains since 2006, we see that 100% of Best Companies now have gay-friendly policies and the trend for gay-friendly benefits continues to edge up from 70% in 2008 to 89% in 2012.

 

Benefits

The most pronounced change over time in the offerings Best Companies extend to employees has been job sharing. In 2007, 71% of Best Companies offered job sharing and in 2012 it is down to 53%. Also a noticeable change since last year is the number of Best Companies that subsidize employees’ gym memberships, down as well (71% vs. 61%). All other benefits are fairly flat from last year.  Perhaps this is an outcome of a prolonged a down economy where employees’ satisfaction with having a job drives their satisfaction with their employer, regardless of job sharing or gym benefits.

Engagement

We wanted to see how many Best Companies represented their organization on the Fortune site with a picture of people (presumably their employees, but we can’t say for sure). The majority did – 64%. However, it begs the question as to why the rest would choose not to showcase their employees when the ranking is so employee-focused and is such a great recruiting tool. Most other pictures were of the corporate headquarters building.

 

 

	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012
Jobs
Average Job Growth	7%	9%	9%	8%	1%	2%	9%
% Companies with Negative Job Growth	N/A	N/A	N/A	22%	41%	45%	11%
Average Voluntary Turnover	N/A	N/A	N/A	12%	7%	7%	8%
% Companies that Never had Layoffs	N/A	N/A	N/A	9%	17%	15%	19%
# Applicants per Job Opening	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	83	N/A*	312
Diversity
% Companies with 50% or More Women	42%	40%	40%	41%	46%	42%	44%
% Women (Average)	N/A	N/A	49%	49%	49%	48%	47%
% Companies with 50% or More Minorities	7%	8%	6%	8%	8%	8%	9%
% Minorities (Average)	N/A	N/A	28%	30%	29%	29%	30%
% Companies with Gay Friendly Policies	N/A	92%	95%	95%	96%	99%	100%
% Companies with Gay Friendly Benefits	N/A	N/A	70%	79%	83%	88%	89%
Benefits
% Companies with Unusual Perks	7%	5%	15%	8%	16%	13%	12%
% Companies with On-Site Child Care	33%	32%	29%	32%	32%	30%	31%
% Companies with Fully Paid Sabbaticals	25%	22%	18%	19%	19%	21%	23%
% Companies with 100% Paid Health Care	14%	16%	21%	15%	13%	14%	14%
% Companies with Job Sharing	N/A	71%	63%	61%	68%	56%	53%
% Companies with On-Site Gym	N/A	N/A	69%	69%	69%	67%	69%
% Companies with Subsidized Gym Membership	N/A	N/A	59%	78%	72%	71%	61%
% Companies with Compressed Workweeks	N/A	N/A	82%	75%	81%	81%	80%
Employee/Employer Engagement
% Companies with Posted Comments on their Best Companies Page	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	15%
% Companies Displaying Images of People on their Best Companies Page	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	64%

 

*Too many companies on list with "NA" to calculate

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:

Types of Speaking Engagement Venues Most Powerful Women in Business Spoke in 2010

Industry Events (50%)

Women’s Leadership Events (43%)

Academic Events (40%)

Five-Star* Events (35%)

Function-Specific (18%)  (i.e., ANA Masters of Marketing, NACD Directorship Forum)

    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