Our blog archives are growing full with descriptions of evolve24’s underlying perspectives on reputation, risk and stakeholder management, and we’ll certainly be back to visit these topics we love some more very soon, but this is also a place to share some of the insights we gain through these methods. Here’s a quick analysis of the effect that the last 30 days of coverage mentioning the stimulus bill or stimulus legislation have had on some major tech firms.

Taking a quick look at Apple, Dell and Sony over the last 30 days on this topic within Twitter, blogs and web, and online video shows that coverage of the stimulus bill has afforded none of these brands with a reputation boost, and that association with the topic has actually adversely impacted Apple and Sony, and been just neutral for Dell.

A quick glance at this coverage reveals that the problem for these brands lies in nature of the association between them and the stimulus bill; most joint references mention the stimulus bill in the context of the economy, then bridge to the firms’ financial performance also in that context. This is a natural pairing of topics, macro-economic conditions and firm performance, but it is not the best topic of coverage for most firms right now, and it is certainly not the only association that could be made between technology companies and economic stimulus.

We know that Financial Performance is one of the key components of corporate reputation, but there are five other drivers of reputation, a couple of which are strongly aligned with economic stimulus. Firms that are actively managing their reputations during a period of economic turmoil and in a context of increased attention on an issue like the stimulus bill should be seeking ways to associate mention of their brand in the context of stimulus with reflections on the firm’s strengths in Innovation, Vision and Leadership.

There is plenty of coverage within the last 30 days around the topics of innovation, vision and leadership in technology endeavors linked to the stimulus package; but most of it just has nothing to do with these established brands. Google and IBM managed to link their innovative sides to this coverage, and faired well in terms of reputation on the topic (even while Apple’s stock outperformed IBM’s for the 30 day period). The coverage of innovation and vision with regard to technology’s role in stimulus has also been focused on small entrepreneurial firms.

As has been said here before, knowing what’s being said about you is a good start, but it’s just a start. This case shows that what’s NOT being said about you can also have an impact.

Over the last year we have all noticed the rise of interests who can tell you about your “Online Reputation.” The thing is, what’s being described by that phrase is not really reputation – it is about something far more simple – online image. Understanding the image your brand presents online can be useful, but image is NOT reputation, it is only a component of reputation. And your online image is only a portion of the total mediated image of your brand, which is also represented through print news, broadcast, and academic and specialty publications.

Corporate Reputation is widely considered to be the function of the collective judgments resulting from multiple stakeholders’ image of the firm and its behavior, evolving over time.

In this function, the images of your firm held by various stakeholders clearly matter. But a key observation here is that there are multiple stakeholders, each forming opinions and making judgments based on unique collections of image derived by online and other sources. Thus, a complete understanding of reputation cannot be formed without 1) distinguishing the topics that reflect existing judgments from the topics that allow new judgments, and 2) engaging in detailed stakeholder classification and measurement, and a good mapping of the relationships between (online and offline) stakeholders – both individuals and groups, and their relative influence on the topics that draw the judgments that drive reputation.

Most of the “Online Reputation Management” solutions I’ve seen aren’t quite as sophisticated in their analysis as what I’ve described above, which is why evolve24 has long provided a better solution for firms that seek a comprehensive and methodological approach to let them understand and manage the full range of components of corporate reputation.

In her last post, Karin pointed out that financial measures taken on their own are not a proxy for reputation measurement. I liked Karin’s example on sales of $1 bills for $0.99; sales numbers will be through the roof, but your reputation amongst investors and creditors will likely suffer, while customers won’t know what to think. Karin’s point can be extended beyond financials to other measurements, like approval rating scores for example.

I was recently in a discussion with a client where they brought up this very point. Imagine looking at a plot of George Bush’s approval rating over time without having any notion of history. You would see that people’s approval jumped 35 points up early on, then bounced up and down from there, trending down. You would intuit events, and you would see the trend – but you would not understand anything.

Understanding measurements requires context. On the day that Wells Fargo recently announced a $2.83 billion loss in Q4, their stock rose over 30% in the day. Neither of these measurements, quarterly loss or daily gain, provide any understanding when taken alone, or even when taken together. But when they are taken with the additional context of earlier earnings (loss) projections and the performance of the rest of the market, they begin to make sense.

Whether we’re seeking to understand corporate reputation, or customer experience, or communications impact, it all works the same way. No single measure of any of these will provide understanding; all are understood only with the right context. Hanging an evaluation of success or failure on a single measure of any kind creates a narrow view of the world, and therefore limits what we can accomplish. Context helps us understand the complexity of the environment in which we conduct finance, or communicate, or sell our bills. Allowing ourselves measures that recognize complexity is a critical step to making good decisions. Not becoming overwhelmed by the complexity is the next challenge.

With the availability of media monitoring tools, it is now quite easy to receive a constant stream of information about topics you wish to monitor, be it your brand, competitive coverage, or industry issues. Many of these tools are so good at finding all the stuff that’s even remotely related to your interest that the amount of content you receive can quickly become overwhelming.

Thanks to digital searching, finding content has become really easy. But things become a little more complicated when we begin to ask what we should do with what we’ve found. Information is not the same as insight.

There is a key distinction between monitoring and measurement. Monitoring gives you all the “what”, but then leaves you asking “so what?” With monitoring, we can now see every bad thing that someone says about us, but as many have begun to learn, we can’t respond to everything. Without knowing which negative (or positive) media matters and which does not, it is possible to cry wolf once too often for management to tolerate. The folks who are monitoring media know that there is really important knowledge to be gained from listening to conversations about our brands, and know that there are insights in that content somewhere that should be integrated into strategy. But monitoring alone won’t separate the wheat from the chaff. To find the important point in a haystack of content, we need to go beyond monitoring, and engage in real measurement.

Two weeks ago on this blog, we highlighted how difficult it can be for an individual to accurately assess their reputation. Companies used to face a similar dilemma: corporate reputation depends on a wide variety of different factors. A firm’s sales, marketing, investor relations and share price, public relations programs, corporate responsibility, customer service, product quality, distribution channels, employees, customers and vendors all have an impact on corporate reputation. Until recently, these different metrics were so fragmented that was impossible to track them successfully. To make measurement easier, many companies began to focus on one metric, usually financial performance, and began to use that metric to measure their reputational success. But a quick look at two of the most commonly used financial measures highlights the perils of this approach.

• Sales. Do strong sales automatically imply a good reputation? Of course not - sales are a very incomplete measure. Sales figures won’t tell you if you’re reaching everyone you could be reaching, and they won’t tell you why people are buying your product. They also aren’t predictive – your current sales figures can’t forecast what will happen next month, when a competing product appears. And they’re certainly not a barometer for how people feel about your company. If you start selling dollar bills for 99 cents, you’ll have very high sales – but very few of your customers will expect you to remain in business, and many of your potential customers may find your practices so suspicious that they refuse to buy even at your current price.

• Stock price: Some analysts would argue that stock price is the only necessary measure of corporate reputation. After all, share price presumably reflects the estimated future value of your company’s bottom line. A strong share price and attention from investors also suggests that you are open and transparent with your numbers, and willing to share your future plans and projects with the investment community. There’s no question that your bottom line, and your willingness to be transparent, will have an impact on your reputation in at least one stakeholder group – investors. But, like sales, share price a very incomplete measure. Over the past year, most companies have seen significant share price declines. Does that really mean that nearly every corporate reputation was damaged? After all, your customers aren’t going to check your stock price before they decide to buy more of your product.
  

Fortunately there are comprehensive tools that provide a much better picture.