Posts Tagged ‘Joy Sever’

My friend Joy Sever, another reputation addict, was just featured in the Wall Street Journal on her business, TellmeOmuse.  The title of the article pulls you right in — Mythical Manhattan. I love her self-description on the web site: ” Joy Marie Sever first read Homer’s Odyssey in 2001. Nothing (and everything) has been the same since.”  I might steal this for myself when people ask me how I discovered my love of “reputation.”  In a way, I do say the same thing. I usually say that my love affair with “reputation” began when I first spied my first most admired companies feature.

“Ms. Sever, a social psychologist, doesn’t have an advanced degree in mythology or classics. She’s an inspired amateur, her passion growing out of reading Homer’s “Odyssey” around 2001. At the same time, she was doing research and helping to create measurement systems about corporate reputation, the results published in The Wall Street Journal. She started to see fascinating parallels between the Greeks and their gods’ obsessions with reputation and those of the Fortune 500 CEOs about whom she was researching.”

If you have an interest in mythology, the Odyssey or expanding your horizons, take a read.

   Over the past few weeks, there have been several reputation rankings released. I am stunned by the proliferation of rankings on reputation. It is getting harder to keep track of whose ranking is whose and what’s behind the numbers. Whereas there used to only be one or two major reputation rankings, today there are scores. We (my team at Weber Shandwick) knows because we keep track of them every day in our database called Scoreboxx.  We must have over 700 primetime corporate rankings that companies can compete on and receive recognition.  These rankings fall into broad categories such as corporate responsibility, workplace, diversity, leadership, etc.  Years ago, a company only had to worry about Fortune’s Most Admired Companies survey. Now you have to be on the alert for lists that give you a thumbs up or thumbs down.

In the past few weeks, we have seen the release of Harris Interactive’s Reputation Quotient,  Reputation Institute’s  Pulse Survey and  Millward Brown’s  Global Brands (BrandZ).  All good and “reputable”  lists. However, they are all coming out at about the same time and comingling in people’s minds.  Years ago when I was at Fortune, we conducted a landmark survey about business readership of business magazines. A few years later, Forbes conducted their  own readership survey of business magazines with a twist that confused the marketplace. The two surveys were similar but because many people still confused Fortune and Forbes, Fortune’s competitive advantage was weakened.  

My reputation advocate friend Joy Sever is right when she says that all these lists are diluting one another because most people do not understand the differences between them and how the data are gathered.  She was right to also say that pretty soon it will all be about the reputation of the reputation rankings. It seems like that has already begun.

The most important way to measure reputation is to take these reputation rankings into account but focus primarily on your own customized research that drills down into your most important stakeholders’ perceptions and most critical reputation dimensions. By tracking your own company reputation vs. competitors over time, reputation-building has its best shot.