Corporate reputation trends for 2014

Leslie Gaines-Ross Chief Reputation Strategist, Weber Shandwick

Leslie Gaines-Ross, Chief Reputation Strategist at Weber Shandwick and author of the ReputationRx blog has offered her analysis of corporate reputation trends for the coming year.

Read her blog at HuffingtonPost.  But her #1 sets the tone for all her observations: " . . . how does a company create a single clear narrative when business is so complex when information is shared within seconds and when a business model is so instantly imitable? . . . . Author and CEO of LRN, Dov Seidman, posits an answer worth repeating -- focus not only on what you are doing, but also on how you are doing it. Do not merely out-perform the competition, out-behave them as well. . . . The most highly reputable companies are hyper-conscious of not only performance, but also of how they build their cultures and their brands."

Some of her other insights:

CEOs and decision-makers must listen to the "whispers" -- insightful monitoring is required to head off reputation risks.

There is a growing importance of "live media" -- conferences, summits, forums -- as a fourth dimension, complementing paid, earned, and owned media categories. One (ironic?) impact of all our technology is that it has been driving us into situations in which we want to meet and interact with people, unmediated by digitalization.

The threats to reputation of uses/misuses of social media will only intensify. The involvement of CEOs is imperative.

The best defender of a corporate reputation may very well be its own employees.