The final part of this thread returns to the two questions carried forward from a roundtable discussion I facilitated; 1) how can you know what people think about you (your company, your leadership, your brands) and 2) can you really “manage” what people think about you? The last two posts worked through the notion of Insider’s Bias and the benefits of objective measurement to bring us to a point where we can begin to turn information about media impressions into insights about people’s perceptions of our brand.

The reputation measurement we looked at in our roundtable is based on an objective, standardized algorithm which applies a reputation score to each piece of coverage about a brand, be it internally or externally written. (These two can later be separated to understand program impact against total coverage). The principal behind this reputation score is that in the absence of positively or negatively charged associations with the brand AND without subjective voice from an influential source, people’s reaction to a message about our brand will be neutral, and that a neutral reaction would mean no change in behavior. The presence of positively or negatively charged language about your brand weighted by the influence of the subjective voice is what has the potential to change people’s opinions of our brand.

This particular measure plotted the daily reputation score over a period of a month, and showed those days when the brand’s total score for the day was above “neutral” and those days it was below. On some days, the brand’s daily reputation was much higher than others, and on some it fell much lower. This prompted a very good conversation about how the timeframe over which a reputation is evaluated can very much shape the perception of reputation impact (and what should be “managed”). Reputation is a long-term form of equity, and short-term tremors seen in monitoring systems need to be evaluated for potential impact in a long-term perspective, and not responded to in a “knee-jerk” fashion. (We have some good approaches to performing such evaluations, to avoid such reactions, but I won’t try and tackle these today).

We are all aware that there is a lot being said about most brands, and many ups and downs in daily conversation. In order to avoid either over or under-reacting to daily coverage, we cannot rely on measures of volume alone. Knowing that a lot was said about our brand, or a competitor, or a topic, is not the most actionable insight. In addition to knowing that people were talking, we also need to know not just what they were saying, but also what kind of influence and long-term impact their perspective might have on what others think of us.

Which brings me around to the question “can you really ‘manage’ what people think about you?” I suppose the answer depends on your definition of “manage”. If you know why people don’t like you, there are things you can do to become more likeable. However, to achieve this, you 1) have to honestly face what makes people dislike you, and 2) address those things to show that you wish to be liked. The activities that the traditional concept of “management” brings to my mind seem too bring too rigid and arrogant an approach to this problem. As perceptions of ourselves held by others, reputations cannot be engineered to take and maintain a specific form, any more than brands can. But they can be grown and tended. If we consider reputation management to be using data and strategic prowess to “command and control” people’s perceptions of us, we will run into problems (see the Cluetrain Manifesto), whereas if we consider reputation management to be about listening and responding to serious and impactful concerns, we are positioning ourselves to grow our reputation.