April 13th, 2012
Regressing in agriculture and technology: the new conservatives
For some people, agriculture has always had an uneasy relationship with technology. Not with farmers, but with the general public and politicians, especially those who live in urban and suburban areas.
Most farmers have had no trouble over many years understanding and trying new technologies, but all too often they have been prevented from applying them, surprisingly, by some of the most conservative force of public opinion.
Generations ago, many opposed and regretted the replacement of horses with mechanized tractors, and before then, the replacement of “night soil” with chemical and artificial fertilizers. Today’s anti-technologists are probably even more conservative than in the past, since a selectivity has developed in the modern conservative taste.
There is one policy when shouting at regulators, politicians and scientific companies; there is another when pushing a cart or trolley around in the supermarket. At once deploring Monsanto, Bayer and agribusiness in general they will take care to buy themselves the cleanest and best looking vegetables in expensive supermarkets.
Some anti-technologists, of course, do not suffer from any hypocrisy on this score. They prefer fallen fruit and will pick out the most mis-shapen vegetables and the dirtiest greens from organic markets. They put the conserve into conservatism. Good luck to them.
Understanding and employing new technology has always proved crucial not only for some farmers to continue to meet growing food, feed and fuel demands but also for other less fortunate farmers to move from subsistency to profitability and this is no less true now that the world population is accelerating upwards.
But modern conservative anti-technologist opinion cannot bring itself to relate to the economic development arguments for the application of technologies in agriculture (the only safe path out of poverty). The anti-technologist claims that you have to sort out the unfairness of modern global food distribution flows before the short term and, in their view, the lesser problem of people starving right now in empty marketplaces.
If there is any genuine concern about current and future hunger in the world, then we must allow modern science and technology to help with food production, whether this be to breed improved varieties of food plants with higher and better yields, or to generate new and more cost-effective production methods, or develop yet more effective fertilizers and pesticides.
Genetic modification can be used to achieve disease resistance or herbicide tolerance or other traits in the future that may be of even more direct benefit to people. But biotechnology is not the only issue in the overall debate about technology in agriculture. It is one technology among many, but it attracts much of the opprobrium.
In many respects the most crucial debate in agricultural technology really concerns the threats to ban products that currently work well in assisting food production, not those that face innumerable obstacles to getting approved for sale and use for the first time.
For the conservative anti-technology activist it is all the same, but many developed countries, especially in Europe, having helped to ensure that GMOs will never be approved, have now turned their attention to an even more conservative task, that of rolling back the years and banning technologies that had already been approved, licensed and successfully used, sometimes for several generations, and which are still vital to farmers in countries with low levels of food security. How sustainable is that?
These are not just conservatives, these are the policies of reactionaries, hypocrites and bigots. The agricultural and rural communities know this, but lots of clever people don’t.
Do governments need to have a good reputation? Reputation surveys are two a penny these days, but according to most such surveys on occupations in the USA or in Europe and probably elsewhere, politicians and government officials rank lower than used car salesmen.
This is not quite the same as saying that governments have a bad reputation, but clearly an appreciation of the reputation of government in general terms can be gained from some assessment of the politicians who aspire to government and the civil servants who work for it.
There is little to indicate that people have a consistent definition of what constitutes a good reputation. So, if a government is looking for a good reputation, what exactly should it be doing? My own first reaction would be to ensure that its hands are clean, that there is no corruption and no instances of unethical behavior in the actions of civil servants or their political masters. To be unfair about it, this has probably never happened in the entire history of the world.
But who actually cares if a government has a bad reputation if it is doing a good job for those who elected it (or even if they didn’t elect it?)
And where are we supposed to measure this reputation? If for example a government’s reputation is bad at international level among other governments, and if that same government is very popular at home, or if its actions and policies and approaches are approved of by its own people but not by those of other countries, then what is the reputation call?
And maybe the government wants to fulfill an international promise it made, for example at Rio 20 years ago. These actions may not go down well at home but they will be received well abroad. What is the reputation call on that?
For congressmen or other elected parliamentarians, it is always going to be difficult, because reputation is not well-defined as a quality, and is easily confused with popularity.
I think the answer may be that reputation is an irrelevant consideration for government, because the business of the government is not about reputation.
Government has a mandate, or in undemocratic countries at least a disputed claim, to govern the country and reputation has almost nothing to do with it when you consider the important requirements of legitimacy, transparency, popularity, and especially stakeholder selectivity.
In other words reputation means nothing until you clarify for whom the reputation assessment is necessary.
For government it is an entirely conditional word. Could it also be so for companies?
At the beginning of the AGM season here is a pertinent question.
How do you deal with people who hate your company? There are some organizations and even more individuals who dislike companies so much that their dislike can seem to border on an obsessive hatred, an inability to think rationally or with moderation. Or, at least, this is how it can appear to companies who are being challenged or even threatened.
Every company has them. They can be lonely losers, self-obsessed, wielding specific and narrowly targeted influence way beyond the real circumstances of their actual situation. They can be embittered ex-employees with a burning grievance or sense of having been swindled or unfairly dismissed. They can be powerful, influential, rich and externally obsessed, like Ralph Nader, millionaire, Lebanon-born American king of NGOs, six-time candidate for President of the United States, and hero of the campaign against the US car industry and General Motors in the 1960s and 1970s.
Admittedly most companies hardly ever bother with the first two categories, but the third category is a recognized problem, posing a real and running threat to corporate reputation. General Motors was certainly obsessed with Nader. It hired private detectives to tap his phones, check his bins and exhaustively investigate his past. It also hired prostitutes to trap him in compromising situations (unsuccessfully). It is far too long ago for him to be accused of being a secret Muslim.
Nader sued the company for invasion of privacy and settled the case early for $425,000, a very large amount in the 1960s, equivalent to nearly $10 million today.
Nader’s lawsuit against GM was ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals, whose opinion in the case expanded tort law to cover “overzealous surveillance.” Nader used the proceeds from the lawsuit to start the pro-consumer Center for Study of Responsive Law and funding his own substantial additional projects. The car industry’s own goal was complete. Indeed it was a hat-trick.
Nonetheless, forty and fifty years on, companies still try to counter-spy, to uncover private facts and more about individuals who appear to display a hostile approach to them. They still try to smear those they perceive to be their enemies, and in doing so forget their lines, their responsibilities and their own stakeholders’ expectations.
I have, unhappily, witnessed a few of these operations, and none of the actions that I have observed to this effect has ever worked without some form of countervailing blow-back. Significantly none of the actions were ever taken on the basis of a management consensus; most were minority actions taken with the private approval of very senior management.
Sometimes, particularly with regard to social media, it’s best not to engage vociferous and determined opponents substantively once it becomes clear that a debate is not being offered.
But some companies get stubborn and self-righteous. They want not only to be right but they want proof and a certificate of it. Deep down, they want their critics to make public grovelling apologies, little realizing that in this there is no difference between them and their tormentors. Eventually they lose credibility with their real customers and other stakeholders by being seen to beat the same drum over and over and enter a corporate trance like an addled hippy.
However, companies need to mix circumspection with passion. They need always to be responsive. They don’t have to turn the other cheek but they should not hide and should never fail to respond with a sense of the debate as a whole and not just the last thing said.
They need also to remain genuine (as long as they had been before) and to show continued understanding of the issue or the grievance.
But really none of these things can be done if you do not demonstrate a transparent commitment to talk directly and openly with external groups and any other individuals who are taking you to task. They may not reply satisfactorily but you have done your best and you will thus impress the people and institutions watching you who really matter.
April 6th, 2012
Comparing reputations for the MOOT Award 2012: George Osborne, Mitt Romney, DSK
Calling politicians out of touch is a very old, even antiquated catcall. Politicians have been guilty of being out of touch from the beginning of politics and there is really nothing new in the criticism. It is always likely to hit the spot in any context and more or less any environment.
But there is more than a touch of irony in the recent international resurgence of this particular criticism. Politicians are being called out of touch everywhere and anywhere. But here’s one for the hardcore political heckler. Who is most out of touch: George Osborne, Mitt Romney, or Dominique Strauss Kahn?
These three gentlemen are the finalists in the Clement Reputation MOOT Award for 2012. MOOT stands for Most Out Of Touch. Please note that I have had no say in the choosing of the finalists. They are here because of a statistical result delivered by Clement Reputation’s brand new reputationometer, set up to count unfavorable reputation-based observations over the past few weeks. But before opening the envelope, let’s have a quick look at how each politician made it here.
George Osborne is being called out of touch because of his imposition of value added tax on hot take-away food bought from food retail establishments (rather than take-away establishments). The idea looks a bit old-fashioned in a class-conscious sense because hot take-away food means pies and pasties, mushy peas and, I presumed, fish and chips. Cold take-away food includes sushi, prawn sandwiches and avocado dip. Need I say more? Well yes, I should, because the way this debate went actually enforced the mistaken impression that this was the Chancellor’s own idea peremptorily picked out of his snooty upper-class satchel, whereas, to be fair, it was an attempt to close the 30 year old loophole that had been generating a 20 percent tax burden on food from hot takeaway food shops for example fish and chips, as at present, but had withheld it on food shops that sold hot food, such as Gregg’s, which is not officially a take-away food shop. Are you following so far?
Few understood this distinction at the time or even now but everyone loved the opening question by a Labour MP to Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Select Committee meeting at the height of the political crisis that developed from the Budget. The question was “when was the last time you bought a (hot) pasty?” George replied that he could not remember. The Labour MP then said, wrongly, that this was exactly the problem. The media ruckus ended with the Chancellor looking foolish and apparently out of touch, whereas the truth was, in many respects, quite the reverse.
Let us move to Seamus the Dog. Er, I mean, to Mitt Romney, a prospective candidate for the Republican nomination for the US Presidential elections later this year. Mitt Romney cannot shake off a series of unflattering stories told about him, all of which in one way or another seem to point to his aloofness. His huge wealth is clearly making it difficult for him to get through this particular needle-eye. However, the best story (and it was ever thus) is one he told himself, that three decades ago when he was the governor of Massachusetts he once put his dog in a cage strapped to the roof of his car (a station wagon) presumably because of a lack of space in the car.
This story continues to dog the unfortunate candidate because Romney, a multimillionaire, has struggled to make clear to people that he understands and feels for the common man. While the dog incident has nothing to do with his wealth, it is taken as symbolic of the idea that he seems to live on a different planet, unconcerned about the impressions of others, including dogs.
(Note to Americans: In England this man would have had to resign and probably commit suicide within minutes of telling this story.)
And now the man many Frenchmen have taken to their heart, a sure sign being the ascription of an acronym to identify him: DSK.
Last year, while trailing his coat for the Socialist candidacy for the French Presidency election, he texted the following cheery message to his friend (my translation into English) “Do you want (can you?) come over to a magnificent hot totty club in Madrid with me (plus some action) on 4 July?”
It has since transpired that DSK did not think that the naked women wandering around at the parties (which he may have had a hand in organizing) could possibly have been prostitutes. The girls have said that the party featured scenes of violence and bestiality. DSK also says that his rights have been manifestly violated by his arrest on suspicion of being the party planner (or “pimp”).
Whatever the merits of the legal case against DSK, and the details of the case are already startling, the political and ethical case is even more challenging. Here is a man who saw nothing wrong with what he was doing, and the significance of this is not the careless amorality but the extraordinary assumption that he would not be condemned by the French public or by his peers, or apparently by his wife, if he was discovered, an attitude he also demonstrated after his unseemly exit from a Washington hotel room earlier last year.
“On reflection,” DSK said recently, “I think I have been naive.” Hey, DSK, that’s not even close..
All is not lost, however, his outrage at his treatment by ordinary people has been mollified by a rapturous welcome to the international speech circuit in Kiev, delivering a lecture organised by Ukrainian billionaire businessman Viktor Pinchuk.
In the circumstances the Clement Reputation MOOT (Most Out Of Touch) award is given to.. DSK!
The Anonymous hacking group claims to have defaced almost 500 websites in China. Targets hit in the mass defacement action included government sites, its official agencies, trade groups and many others.
A message available on the hacked sites said the attack was carried out to protest against the Chinese government’s strict control of its citizens. Wow, that must piss them off, big time.
It urged Chinese people to join Anonymous and stage their own protests against the regime/ Let’s hope that they do. The announcement awas made via an Anonymous China account that was established in March.
Sites defaced had the same message posted to them that scolded the nation’s government for its repressive policies.
It read: “Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.”
China has one of the most comprehensive web control and surveillance systems in the world, known as the Great Firewall of China. It reinforces its political social controls and tries to restrict what Chinese people can talk about when they go online.
The Anonymous attackers have posted links to help people avoid official scrutiny of what they do and say online.
There has been no official confirmation of the action. News wires have reported that government officials have denied any action had taken place. No surprise there.
However, many of the sites listed are now offline and a few others displayed a hacked page for a long time rather than their own homepage.
Well done the Anon. On the evidence so far, you are better friends to ordinary people than any Government.
Just as the nature of reputational risks varies from company to company, so too does the potential damage of each such risk that any company faces.
But one of the biggest risks of all is probably the most difficult to cover or even to address.
This concerns the inherent honesty of the company concerned and that of their senior management. Some companies have integrity built into their culture, an honesty that stays embedded because of the practice of the personnel; senior, junior, top and bottom. Other companies do not have integrity but they think they do. Others have little or no integrity, know they do not, but claim they do, believing the outside world to be gullible. Others yet again just have no integrity, do not claim to do so, and do not care. This is most normally demonstrated in their treatment of personnel.
For the companies who are dishonest or in denial, this situation presents a very difficult early hurdle to overcome for the in-house reputation manager, especially one arriving new to the company and to the task from elsewhere.
It is a commonplace observation in the larger and international companies that new recruits or external consultants are effectively the only people who can even aspire to change things in the company, as everyone else is too tired, too discredited, too ground down, too arrogant and too ‘experienced’ to stake their careers on what will be often presented as disloyalty.
Companies where this observation is a commonplace are generally institutionally corrupted, perhaps not irrevocably so, but it’s difficult to see how transparency can work in such an environment, or how a genuinely ethical culture can put down roots.
Another sign of corruption can show from the attitude of the senior communications manager. Is he or she a hoarder and guardian of information or a provider and sharer of information? If the former then that person is far less likely to be honest in other areas of decision-making and leadership.
In such companies, communications resources get consumed by the bigger functions of the company, for example in brand maintenance (featuring the ever-expensive advertising) and enterprise risk management rather than issue, stakeholder or reputation management.
These are also generally the companies in which a senior manager asks you repeatedly for the business case for reputation management. As a response you can ask the questioner to provide the business case for NOT having reputation management. But update your CV first…
Many companies have adopted and implemented robust enterprise risk management (ERM) systems, largely because it is far easier to make a short term business case for these. But, given that reputation disasters can encompass enterprise disasters, companies should also be developing processes to address threats to reputation with at least as much effort as they do with threats to enterprise.
Progressive companies with integrity are unlikely to have these problems. They allocate appropriate resources for covering reputation and issue exposure.
Communicators in these companies, managed and encouraged by sharers of information, are making better-informed decisions affecting reputation and this is creating a robust platform for strong and confident external relations.
In fact, if this platform isn’t there for all the company communicators and not just the CEO and senior management acolytes then the reputation of the company will inevitably suffer, whatever the enterprise or the markets may do.
March 31st, 2012
From Intercourse to Onan: how the email has ruined communications
How often do you send someone an email asking a question or making an inquiry when you might better have phoned them and had a conclusive conversation?
I once sat opposite someone at work who would regularly invite me to lunch with him that same day. By email. We were bleedin’ well opposite each other. But after a while I felt I was also too busy to talk so I too started replying by email.
But we seem to be starting to lose, not only the art of conversation, but the art of communications overall.
For all the world’s obsession with emails, one point is salient and striking (albeit a whopping generalization). Within the last 20 years people in the industrialized and developed countries have changed their principal mode of collective communication from audio telephony to email and text. From communal to solitary.
From two way to one way. From discussion to declamation. Video conferencing hasn’t caught on yet but tapping out text while walking along the pavement has.
And a steady stream of people are regularly dying as they tap out their texts while walking across roads, into walls, off cliffs, or while driving.
And yet the telephone is interactive – you can say ‘hello, what’s up?’, and you can hear the other person respond ‘hi!, I’ve got a bad headache, what are you doing?’ etc. And you dont have to wait for the answer to the question ‘Hey, shall we go for lunch later?’
The email/text can only ever be an unmoderated statement, encouraging people to get used to waiting for an answer when they ask, something they are not particularly used to in live conversation.
Of course they don’t have to wait nearly as long as they would have to if they had sent a letter through the post, but my basis for comparison is not the post but the telephone or live speech.
This extraordinary development from phone to email is an unprecedented technological example of people opting against a more advanced, more immediate and more available communication exchange to a primitive transmission; from an interactive form of intercourse to one way, onanistic comment into the void.
Aristotle would have rejoiced at this stunning confirmation of his transmission-reception dichotomy. It is as if our stone age ancestors took a look at two way radio and collectively decided to stick with ululation in order to communicate.
The advantages of email in the business context are many times more, but few of them reflect well on actual business use. And yet it’s obvious just why the email has caught on and stayed.
Email appeals to and encourages our worst instincts. It allows rest to the wicked and cover to the shy. It turns a conversation into a code, and it turns leadership into disembodied commands, suiting the tens of thousands of appalling bosses who prosper through opting not to communicate properly or clearly in business environments. Email is Pontius Pilate, it comes supplied with a bar of soap and hand towels.
Email is also perfect for the business vice of ambiguity. Are you one of those who do not reply at all if you find the response difficult or too sensitive to make? Do you pray that you do not meet them as this will expose you to that old fashioned face to face where, yes, you really do have to reply to a straight question? It’s the first and surest evidence of cowardice. Nothing enrages people more than the knowledge that someone has got the email that was sent to them and that needs an answer but has decided not to answer it at all.
This cowardice represents the purest expression of ambiguity because there is always that flickering possibility that the intended recipients have not read the email or that it has been ‘lost’ in the ether. Letters really did get lost in the post in the past but we continue to lie to each other about emails that somehow apparently never made it despite being properly addressed and sent.
Rather than reduce ambiguity by appearing to facilitate the yes/no conundrum, email actually increases ambiguity, as even if you do respond you can get away with lazy, gnomic and target-missing answers that would be picked up and corrected immediately by any interlocutor in a live conversation.
Email allows us to send an email saying we are too busy, and fail to understand the irony. Email has brought the practice of interactive meetings to a standstill, as all around the meeting table the small sounds of barely audible clicks and sidelong glances show that no-one is actually participating in the meeting. They are all there but barren in original thought; only their blackberries are fruitful.
Email makes cliches look reasonable and validates the worst excesses of business-speak, making it the favorite communication method of internal communications programs. But above all, it allows secrecy, pretense and pseudo-confidentiality to flourish and copiously rewards those who are engaged in these for a living.
For personal communications, the crimes are more innocent. It means you don’t have to move from your seat in order to conduct a conversation, stilted as it may become.
Because for many people it is less challenging to write on your own than to talk in company, email has the huge benefit of not betraying your feelings, so the recipient has to guess them without being able to look deep into your eyes.
No, despite its many obvious advantages, email has overall been an disaster for communications. It has turned us from social communicants to corner-loving losers with keyboards and RSI.
Let’s hope it is just a passing phase, otherwise companies and individuals will soon stop communicating meaningfully with each other altogether.
Imagine how extraordinarily difficult it must be to cover the Syrian uprising as a news story. Of all the Arab Spring stories this has to be the most difficult for any journalist to tell with any accuracy or authority.
Foreign journalists have not been underrated by the Syrian authorities, as they have so often been elsewhere. (Remember the Iraqi Information Minister in 2003 denying that the US invaders were in Baghdad when evidence to the contrary could be viewed right behind him?).
Overall, the Syrian regime understands how important the global media is and has illustrated this amply by treating it as much the enemy as the insurgents themselves, many of whom risk and lose their lives protecting the journalists because of that very same importance.
Social media is playing its growing role, but with this comes a widening imbalance between the transparency of the offering and the networks’ need for relevance, realism and immediacy.
The assault on Homs by Syrian government forces has generated a news wave of video journalism by amateur filmmakers, determined to record what is happening, and what is happening is sometimes not what can be recorded. Just as reality is not always the same as the truth.
Since the beginning of the uprising, those behind the uprisings have used social media as a key means of distributing the news to media outside the country.
The Syrian regime knows how influential the videos are. But it’s important to be realistic. Something is always going to be wrong in the communication of the truth. Somewhere along the line it will occasionally be sacrificed for the better communication of the reality, and upholstered as necessary to gain the audience it needs for political and, doubtless, economic reasons.
Literally thousands of videos have been uploaded to video sharing platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube in the past few weeks that seek to illustrate Syria’s agony and it would not be surprising in the least to discover that some of these have been faked in one way or another.
Social media has become one of the key tools for telling the outside world the modern story of Syria and of the desperate attempts of those in the uprising to publicize the destruction, violence and damage being wrought upon them by government forces.
Sometimes the sensory impact that is necessary simply cannot be produced from the truth. The camera misses everything when it is in the wrong location or being used at the wrong time. In other words the picture, the gunshots, the explosions to illustrate the narrative, go missing and cannot therefore satisfy a prurient audience, ever ready for the instant gratification of the authentic pictures of war. Hard-faced as the buyer is, these news goods have to look appropriate to the story.
It’s not the first time that pictures have been faked to make a valid point (take a bow, Piers Morgan) and it will not be the last, but some people – mostly sensitive souls – have been genuinely shocked and even outraged to hear that some of the videos and reports have been faked to ensure that all the authentic sounds of battle ring true in viewers’ ears.
Some of the artifice will not be so shocking. For instance, activists are also circulating advice online on how to take pictures of the killed and maimed and of torture victims for use in any future trials.
There will be many, especially Syrians, who quite legitimately wonder what the fuss is all about. Both sides will try to present events from a perspective favorable to them and will resort to fabricating the news for their purposes.
This should not be surprising because this is not living room entertainment, this is war, genuine war without quarter given, no rules, no mercy, and nothing less than the battle for civilization in Syria.
From this perspective, manipulating certain pictures and sounds is hardly the main issue. For others, including the comfortable viewing public in other countries, it is information and they prefer it to be scientifically authenticated and correct. So the battle rages and the videos continue to upload. Nowhere better than during such conflicts is the ongoing struggle between the great principles of truth and reality so well illustrated.
Let’s be clear about what is happening, not just in the social media but in modern social life generally. Not to put too fine a point on it, the doors of perception are both swinging open and getting a lot more difficult to walk through.
As communication channels proliferate, people are passing more data but communicating less with each other, and they are reverting to a hand flutter as they pass each other instead of stopping to talk.
Where is this all going? It is very difficult to peer through the rolling gloaming but while our eyesight improves, our lines of sight become more encumbered, and get refracted. We are declaiming and talking more, and we are debating and listening less.
As the US Presidential elections loom in the shadow glitz of the future, and recent elections in Europe are analysed and digested, we are realizing that people are starting to believe nothing. They are assuming that everything they are told is dubious, unlikely or just counterfeit, a product of spin, misdirection and lies.
When a company claims that they are a people business, it is more than likely that they are quite the opposite. If you are told that customers come first, you will be put on hold for more than ten minutes or referred to a web site (how irritating is that?) If a company claims to be a thought leader, you can be sure that they are near the back of the elephant trail and waiting for the next idea to be prattled back down the line. The only certain outcome of this behavior is the graveyard.
Some tabloid newspapers have given up with the truth altogether because the truth doesn’t sell. Unfortunately this is true whether it is the media, second hand cars, third hand policies, corporate responsibility or snake oil. If something sells that does not necessarily give it value. It simply confirms a price.
But when people believe nothing, they will believe anything. One might be forgiven for suspecting that for this reason alone it is in the interest of all propagandists to keep people ignorant and suspicious, because like this they can be manipulated with the greatest of ease.
The way back is through genuine and committed communication, a communication that waits for an answer, that explains and illustrates, that is patient and painstaking.
For companies, the best way back to the foothills of corporate reputation would be the banning of all internal email messages within sites and a training course on how to use that dusty thing hidden by the books called a telephone.
But to be realistic, the indiscriminate use of email is adding to the growing communication problems that companies have with their stakeholders and especially with their employees.
Also, they should stop grabbing the tail of the company in front..
With all the available communications resources cheaply obtained and even more cheaply used, our generation probably communicates less meaningfully or intelligently amongst ourselves than any generation past, literate or not. I say this because the evidence grows every day that most people do not read more than two lines of text before they press the like button, or make a one brief comment and maybe three lines are needed before they even think of sharing.
Fewer of us are reading, and those who are, are reading less. But we are not slow in coming to a conclusion about what we have glanced at. Even on the hallowed pages of Linked-In, it is fairly clear that many, perhaps most, readers do not even click past the headline before they either move on (acceptable) or start to tap out a quick reaction (unacceptable).
And we just don’t know too many companies “by reputation” although we know many companies as consumers and customers and when they are in the news. Sometimes we think that familiarity and favorability might be enough to be called reputation. This describes reputation as a remarkably thin line.
But to have a good reputation, companies need more than a few thousand likes on their Facebook page, cheaply collected through some misleading promotion. Companies need the relationship itself to enable current social collaboration and future social commerce.
Once companies understand that reputation has to be earned primarily by actions and commitments and not just by good social media engagement, likes, blog endorsements and online members, then the reputation line will get bolder and wider and will cross the declining brand line for sure and soon.
The reason for the skepticism is, I am sure, the ‘like’ button. This allows me. you and millions others to express our views publicly in a split second.
It is a blessing to those who claim to be able to measure reputation as it allows them simply to count the ‘likes’ and pretend that this is also a valid way of measuring reputation.
But it is deeply misleading to equate the like button with any sort of social or political activism, and still less as a measurement of reputation.
I don’t like the Like button
