Domain Whys

Reputation can be considered as a component of the identity as defined by others and is the social evaluation of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. It is an important factor in many fields, such as education, business, online communities or social status.

Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. It affects phenomena of different scale, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.

www.advertiserreputation.com

www.publisherreputation.com

www.groupreputation.com

Image and reputation are distinct objects. Both are social in two senses: they concern properties of another agent (the target’s presumed attitude toward socially desirable behavior), and they may be shared by a multitude of agents. However, the two notions operate at different levels. Image is a belief, namely, an evaluation. Reputation is a meta-belief, i.e., a belief about others’ evaluations of the target with regard to a socially desirable behavior. To better understand the difference between image and reputation, the mental decisions based upon them must be analyzed at the following three levels:

Epistemic

Accept the beliefs that form either a given image or acknowledge a given reputation. This implies a believed evaluation gives rise to one’s direct evaluation. Suppose I know the friend I mostly admire has a good opinion of Mr. Berlusconi. However puzzled I may be by this dissonance-inducing news, I may be convinced due to my friendship to accept this evaluation and share it.

Pragmatic-strategic

Use an image to decide whether and how to interact with a particular target. Once I have my own opinion, perhaps resulting from acceptance of others’ evaluations,  I will use it to make decisions about my future actions concerning that target.

Mimetic

Transmit my evaluative beliefs about a given target to others. Whether or not I act in conformity with a propagating evaluation, I may decide to spread the news to others.

www.firmreputation.com

Many businesses have public relations departments dedicated to managing their reputation. In addition, many public relations firms describe their expertise in terms of reputation management. The public relations industry is growing due to the demand for companies to build corporate credibility and hence reputation. Incidents which damage a company’s reputation for honesty or safety may cause serious damage to finances. For example, in 1999 Coca-Cola lost $60 million (by its own estimate) after schoolchildren reported suffering from symptoms like headaches, nausea and shivering after drinking its products.

www.onlinedeception.com

Online deception could mean to deliberately transmit, retransmit or alter a communications to mislead an adversary’s interpretation of the communication with the use of devices, operations, and techniques, misleading communications links or internet navigation systems.

www.poorreputation.com

The convergence of globalization, instantaneous news and online citizen journalism magnifies any corporate wrongdoing or misstep. Barely a day goes by without some company facing new assaults on its reputation. Reputation recovery is the long and arduous path to rebuilding equity in a company’s good name. Research has found it takes approximately 3.5 years to fully recover reputation and it takes a company seven years to go from good to great. The path is clearly long. The reason reputation recovery has risen in importance is that the “stumble rate ” among companies has risen exponentially over the past five years. In fact, 79% of the world’s most admired companies have lost their number one positions in industries in that time period. Companies which were once heralded as invincible, no longer are.

www.reputationofficer.com

Although many companies will say company reputation is the job of the CEO, managing reputation is a daily function and can best be given to an individual in the organization. There are only a handful of people in the business world with the word “reputation” in their titles.