What’s the new buzzword? Reputation.
Apparently we are moving away from branding and customization and conversation and personalization. Those buzzwords are over, done. Or they aren’t. But right now you are hearing a lot about reputation. What is our reputation? How do we measure it? What effects it? Can we adjust it?
Check this story from the Nieman Journalism Lab:
In conversations with chief marketing officers at major financial institutions, like Bank of America, it became clear that many of these companies were dealing with a serious corporate image problem. Rogers said those conversations led to Forbes’ latest service: a reputation tracker, which gives a company an understanding of how its corporate image is perceived by both the general public and by Forbes readers. The idea is to help companies get a benchmark for their relative strength or weakness.
Well, Bank of America would have a reputation problem wouldn’t they, what with the whole Merrill Lynch thing, the whole government bailout thing as well as being one of the biggest corporations in a sector that no one trusts. Not the public, not the government. I am not even sure their clients trust them anymore. Or their employees. But that is not the point right now. Reputation is.
Why all of a sudden are businesses so concerned with reputation? Haven’t they always been?
OF COURSE!
But as businesses start to come around to the effectiveness and ubiquity of social media, they are applying their measurement and reporting skills to this new field. And it turns out, lo and behold, that this social media thing, this internet thing, actually is useful. You mean its not a waste of time after all?
See, businesses liked being duped by advertisers and marketers, by magazines and newspapers, by ANYONE or ANYTHING that would and did take their money in the 20th century. They liked not really ever knowing how effective their ad campaigns were. It was just the cost of doing business. Have to maintain the brand. Have to reboot every few business cycles. Have to get those fancy marketers in here with their cool graphics and their facial hair to tell us what the plebs are thinking and doing and how they’re spending the money that WE WANT. So we’ll pay you to tell us something, but whether its true or not doesn’t really matter. It’s just the cost of doing business. Right?
And now that businesses have come around to the fact that you can accurately measure things online, you better believe they are putting the squeeze on the very same people who have been squeezing them for going on….a hundred years.
So now the marketers and advertisers are fighting back. They’ve gone and invented some new term that they can use to rip off businesses with the most important thing there is: their reputation. See, by charging them fees to measure and monitor their reputation, they can cause a diversion. Instead of just telling them straight up that their business sucks, their model is broken and they need to scrap everything and start over, they can invent a new term, inflate it to Hindenburg-size proportions and shake it in front of their clients’ faces.
I wonder how many firms are going to fall for it. Not surprising that Bank of America is first up to get suckered. Good luck with that guys.
Image Source: Hans_van_Rijnberk on Flickr
{ 1 trackback }