In my last post I likened the mainstream media to stakeholder groups. I outlined how the centralized ownership structure of the media can result in predictable viewpoints, and that these reporting tendencies can be grouped in order to build intelligence about who is friend and who is foe in the arena of reputation management and strategic outreach. But what about the seemingly unpredictable entity we know as social media?

Explicit or not, the theme of unpredictability underscores much of today’s social media literature. Social media is frequently framed as a swell that can switch course and swallow reputations without warning. Left unchecked this may be true. However, unpredictability isn’t intrinsic to the medium.

Much like its traditional counterpart, social media is rooted in its relationships. Although devoid of an “ownership structure”, there will always be a parent, a primary idea broker, who can be identified as the central agenda-setter. In her book, Corporate Reputation: 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation, Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, defines these “micro-constituencies”, such as starbucked.com, as “loose confederations of like-minded people”. These constellations of influencers provide the necessary context for identifying, measuring, and anticipating who has the most influence over your brand’s reputation.

Once the most influential outlets who are talking about your industry and your brand are identified, they need to be examined for their relationships with other social media outlets. Who is dialed in to the conversation? Are they related to other influential constellations? What constitutes this relationship? Approaching social media in terms of relationships - treating the medium as a stakeholder group - helps make the medium more readily understood, more predictable.

Interestingly, as I write this I see that The Consumerist is up for sale, http://consumerist.com/5084569/consumerist-is-for-sale. Perhaps social media is moving closer to the aforementioned Herman/Chomsky Propaganda Model. Perhaps the tracking of predictable influencers will only become that much easier once the filters of the model encompass social media.

Our media universe has split into two dimensions – mainstream media versus social media – predictable discourse versus unpredictable discourse. The following two posts discuss how reputation practitioners can leverage the characteristics of broadcast and narrowcast media in order to get in front of the issues that challenge their brand and their industry.

The Journalism School at Columbia University provides a relatively up-to-date listing of who owns what in the mainstream media, http://www.cjr.org/resources.
The lists are impressive and indicate that our options for information within the mainstream media are an illusion of choice rather than a plurality of unfiltered viewpoints. For example, Hollinger International, of Conrad Black fame, had nearly two- hundred fifty holdings across four countries in its stable of outlets. That’s two-hundred fifty tongues speaking from one platform.

In their book, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman make the case that media ownership is one of five “filters” that shape mainstream editorial content. The vested interests of these media conglomerates can be mapped, and their diversified commercial and political interests, that which extends beyond the domain of the mass media, can be exposed. In essence, a thorough mapping would grant reasoned insights into what would constitute “news” for these outlets; what would receive attention, treatment, and what would not.

Simply, the economic and political underpinnings of the mass media make the sources within the medium predictable. One can expect and anticipate a certain direction, news texture, and ideological flavor from these streams. I’m sure you’ve heard the water cooler debate about the merits of FOX and CNN news?

In terms of corporate reputation, this ideological clustering of the media essentially means that mainstream media outlets are stakeholder groups, whose interests can be mapped for alignment or deviation with the values of your company. Once mapped these groups can be measured for influence over the direction of your company’s reputation and the industry in which it occupies. Mapping, of course, also means that your company can anticipate where the next negative or positive messages about your brand are likely to emanate, and plan outreach programs around these situations. With the right tools, traditional news media is a stream of predictable content that can be quantified for its varying influence over your brand’s reputation.

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.

Marketing and communications professionals obviously work with the intention of appealing to their audience and swaying their opinions toward a favorable impression of the brand, and thus toward favorable behavior. But marcom professionals are constrained to thinking from within their own experience as much as anyone else. As good marcom professionals, we try and understand the motivations of our audience before we seek to influence their opinion – it would be folly to think that we can persuade someone we don’t understand.

But the Insider’s Bias at its most insidious has this very problem, it lets us assume that we are just like the average reader (or the reader is just like us), or assume that we at least understand the reader’s field of perceptions and motivations. Thus, if we write something that seems positive to us, we are confident it will perceived as positive by the reader. But not all readers are like us. To begin with, they don’t work for our company, and they don’t think about our brand as much (or as positively) as we do. They process in a few seconds what we spent hours or days making, if they find our message at all amidst the torrent of efforts to influence their perceptions that pour on them each day.

Planning optimal communications, and evaluating our effectiveness in influencing readers, requires a willingness to step outside of our comfort zone and think like someone totally indifferent to our message, someone whose indifference will be pelted daily with a barrage of other messages also seeking to influence their opinion. This is really tough to do as purely a mental exercise. Thus, to get outside our comfort zone, to stop operating in a world we expect will perceive things our way, to develop messages that anticipate the indifference and competition and therefore stand out and have an impact, to create truly impactful communications that drive behavior, we need objective insight into the whole of what influences our target audience and how they are influenced, and we need objective measurement as to whether our communications will be/were effective in that context.

This returns this thread from a digression into the notion of bias back to the question of measures by which we can move from assuming that because they saw our stuff they’re now thinking our way, to really understanding what people think of us – i.e. taking an honest look at our reputation’s reflection in the mirror.

My last post asked two questions that were posed to a roundtable of communicators recently; 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?

To think though the first question, we started with some examples of the reputation metrics that evolve24 provides. However, before we can develop metrics, we first need data. The data we use comes from media monitoring, a topic which needs to be addressed as the precursor to knowing what people think of you.

Media Monitoring tells you what is being said about you and your industry. Agencies and media aggregation companies have been providing this information since time immemorial, and recently a new slate of options have appeared to add social media monitoring to the mix. There is certainly value in knowing what is being said, but knowing what is being said is not the same as knowing what people think about you.

Knowing what people think about you means not just knowing what they saw, but also understanding how they felt when they saw it. But thinking from that perspective often requires overcoming a challenge I have observed in many communications teams; the challenge of insider’s bias.

Insider’s bias is often ingrained in communications teams in a few ways. First, there is the bias that is most concerned not with knowing what was said about us, but more specifically what was said “by us”. This is media monitoring as scorekeeping, a way to tally the eyeballs that saw what we said about ourselves. This bias is often resistant to knowing what was said “about us” because that is beyond our control. All these teams want to know is did their message get out there. If the message was disseminated, then the program was a success. Often this concern is extended to the channels that got the message out, such that a message published by a typically uninterested outlet is seen as a prize.

What is missing here of course is the context of the conversation. Yes the message got out, but it was sharing all those eyeballs with other messages about the brand, those messages not of our making. Simply knowing that the message was circulated tells us nothing about whether it had an impact – i.e. whether it influenced what people think about us. To know that, we have to consider what about the message would have an influence on people’s thoughts and behavior, and what other messages would have an equally strong or stronger influence. Of course, influencing impressions positively is the point of drafting a communication or planning a marketing campaign. But we writers are insiders, we start with a favorable impression of what we’re writing about, and we don’t always think of the broad and strange variety of messages that will be competing with ours. That’s the other arm of insider bias – the difficulty in thinking like someone we’re not – our audience. More on this next post.

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.

“Content clouds”, not to be confused with their useful sister, “tag clouds”, are the latest graffiti to appear on the net. And true to form, it is arguable how much meaning can be gleaned from these puffy word abstractions.

Content clouds are essentially nests of words that represent the count or frequency of expressions within a given document. They have become very popular during the presidential race; speeches from both McCain and Obama have appeared on the net reduced to only the most salient words used by each speaker. Tag clouds, popularized by web tools such as del.ic.ous and sites like Flickr, are weighted word bubbles consisting of tags, which are user-generated content, put there by the audiences who frequent the sites. Tag clouds have obvious utility. Seeing what people care enough to flag on the net provides insight into popular trend and profiles the collective consciousness. On the other hand, not unlike sweeping clutter into like piles, the utility of content clouds is a little less clear.

The proliferation of content clouds is evidence that news sites and bloggers alike have ascribed these visuals with value. Is it important and meaningful that Obama used the word “country” more than McCain? These comparisons do little more than contrast rhetoric, never mind analyze argument. Suggesting that content clouds can be supplanted for a thorough reading of a text is false.

These clouds would be more useful if coupled with other analytics. For example, applying a semantic risk metric across a content cloud would cull inherent risks from the word nest, and would reveal much more than just grouped, prominent words. One could then quantitatively measure the meaning within the communication - gauging risk - rather than just seeing what is being communicated and making qualitative assessments. This is effectively turning a denotative visual, that which simply represents, into a connotative analytic, that which assesses the underlying signification, or meaning of a text.

With all of the excitement surrounding social media and the windows with which we peer into this content, we can get swept up with half-baked analytics and visuals whose business value is only so deep. I admit, content clouds are interesting, they’re fun to look at, and they make great water cooler talk. But in terms of hard, decision-making analytics they tend to be a little fluffy.