Seth Godin’s blog today pointed out five pillars of success: see (really see) what’s possible, know specifically what you want to achieve, make good decisions, understand the tactics to get things done and to change minds, and earn the trust and respect of the people around you.

As he mentioned, it seems like many of us spend the most time on the fourth pillar – understanding tactics to get things done and change minds. Though Seth may not have been referring to social media today, it does seem like this is an issue endemic in the social media sub-culture. Too many of the players in this space focus solely on tactics. They preach about the importance of monitoring Twitter feeds, but never explain – or understand – how, or if, monitoring these feeds will make a meaningful impact on corporate reputation. They’ve done well with the tactics, but they’ve ignored the main goal.

Corporations that truly want to understand and change their reputation need to move away from this short term focus on tactics, and from the players that focus solely on tactical objectives.

To truly be successful, and to change your company’s perception, you need to truly understand, and commit to, a long term strategy and goals. You need to know which strategic initiatives will help you achieve those goals, and you’ll need to make the right decisions to ensure those initiatives are successful. You’ll need to track the performance of each initiative, understand how it contributes to or detracts from your corporate reputation, and adjust it as necessary to fit your strategy. You will need to make tactical moves as you move towards your goal, but these should be made with your overarching strategy in mind. Maintaining this long-term focus, and measuring, monitoring and tracking your success towards your goals, is the only way to ensure your company achieves the trust and respect it is striving for.

Have you ever visited HotOrNot.com?
This website, which has bruised thousands of egos and wasted many thousands of hours, uses social media techniques to show you what people think of you. More specifically, it lets you upload your picture and allows anyone else who sees it to make that critical choice: hot, or not?

The site is juvenile but it highlights an interesting issue. Most of us don’t really know what other people think of us. We can ask our friends and colleagues but rarely will we get an honest answer (“Honey, do you think I’m fat?” comes to mind). Full-circle performance reviews come closer to the truth but only provide a picture of your work performance. There are offerings that promise to help you “manage your reputation” online, but these are really about just visibility, and do nothing to help uncover people’s real perceptions of us. So are these “online reputation” offerings really helping us understand and manage our reputations? The answer depends on what constitutes our reputation. Is it just what other people think of us?

There are other definitions, but that’s exactly what they all boil down to. And that’s what makes reputation such a concern. It has a tremendous impact. Our families, our careers, and our friends all depend to some extent on our personal reputation, and it’s very hard for us to measure our personal reputation.

Even if we could measure it, one measurement wouldn’t be enough. It varies depending on who’s thinking of us. We all hope our spouse thinks of us very differently than a coworker does. People we’ve never met may also have ideas about us based on things they’ve seen or stories they’ve heard.

There are no easy comparisons. A reputation is much harder to quantify than a photo posted on HotOrNot.com. You might live a completely green lifestyle, but your neighbor adopts homeless puppies. Is his reputation better than yours?

Finally, we’re all aware that some people’s opinions matter more than others. Your boss’s opinion of you will always be much more important than that of the guy who sits six cubicles down.

By identifying which aspects of reputation matter the most, understanding that different situations call for different strengths, and prioritizing our interactions, we can change our reputation. Since most of our personal interactions are face to face, though, we may never get a complete measure of where we stand.

Great companies follow the same steps to enhance their corporate reputation, but they have a significant advantage. Corporate reputations can be measured, monitored and tracked. We’ll go into more detail on that next week. Meanwhile, feel free to comment and share your thoughts.