Welcome to the Reputation Economy

CNBC Business magazine (@CNBC) contributing editor Colin Brown (@colinmlbrown) writes

You don't need to be BP, Toyota, News Corp, or even Tiger Woods to know how quickly ‘brand equity’ can be destroyed by screw-ups, cover-ups, and indiscretions. In the face of such PR fiascos, the accepted repair strategy has been to come clean as quickly and as contritely as possible. But in an era when corporate skeletons are subject to constant social media scrutiny, your business can suffer just as easily by being too transparent. Ask Bank of America....

Many see measurement of reputation — trust quotients, if you like — as the next big frontier on the Web. Just as Google unleashed the search potential of the Internet with its PageRank analysis that assigned a numerical weighting to every nugget of information, so a new breed of reputation brokers is starting to define Web 3.0 with the equivalent of 'PeopleRank' scores. You might think of these as Yelp ratings for people, creating a hierarchy of individuals and companies based on reputation scores....

Read this in full.

Also see Warc's (@WarcEditors) article, "Corporate Social Responsibility Could Benefit Brands" quoting Nielsen's (@NielsenWire) report, "The Global, Socially-Conscious Consumer."

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you strategically understand your brand’s reputation management.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Marketing/Public Relations tab.