Last Friday I had the privilege of facilitating a breakfast roundtable on “Reputation Management in a Fragmented Media World” with a group of really smart communications professionals at a breakfast hosted by the agency Tech Image. Even before our session had formally started, the conversation had turned to social media and its impact on efforts to manage corporate reputation.

One of the key distinctions that emerged early as our conversation took off from that platform was the difference between reputation and brand, and how that difference is accentuated through social media. We started with the question, “is reputation = brand”, and the consensus at the table was that no, in fact “reputation > brand”.

Most everyone agreed that the groundswell has disproven the old understanding of brand as the mediated set of associations that can be planted in the minds of consumers to motive their purchasing behavior. To paraphrase from 'Groundswell', brand is not what you construct, it is now whatever people say it is. There is no static “Brand”, there is only the ongoing effort to influence what people think though branding. But if branding cannot construct a fortress of favorable impressions capital B “Brand”, then what can it do? In short, it simply composes part of your reputation.

After some discussion, the definition of reputation at our table was understood as an evolving expectation about a company or product arising from the ongoing exchange of unmediated perspectives of communicators, consumers and critics alike. Branding can contribute to reputation, but people’s perception of the brand, the embodiment of the firm, will be influenced by the firm’s reputation.

In other words, put very simply, reputation is what people think of you. So to close the circle, in the fragmented media world we were discussing, where your brand is what people say it is – what they say it is depends very much on what they think about you. Which leads to two questions, 1) how well do you know what they think about you? And 2) can you really “manage” what they think about you? I’ll share some thoughts on those questions in my next post.