Worth Reading, Oct 15, 2012

1. Reputation loss and crisis: Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross provides a useful analysis of a recent report, Reputation Review 2012, in her post “The High Cost of Reputation Loss.” The report looks at the dynamic between crisis and a company’s financial performance, and as Dr. Gaines-Ross summarizes, found, “Among 10 crisis-ridden companies in 2011, only News Corp found itself in positive terrain afterwards. In fact, what they found was that 7 of the top 10 lost more than one third of their value. Two companies lost nearly 90% of their value.” The report also looked at the effects of having a reputation recovery process in place, the CEO’s response, and clear and transparent communication on the overall recovery process after a major crisis.

2. Customer beliefs and communication: Shel Holtz’ review of research from The Futures Company and its report, “Global MONITOR 12/13,” should give all corporate communicators something to think about in today’s environment. As Holtz says,  “An overwhelming 86 percent of consumers believe that companies put profits over the interests of their customers’ interests, according to a report on the study. That means any communication or marketing campaign faces a brick wall of skepticism.” Holtz outlines a few approaches for companies to work more effectively to align behavior and communication.

3. Employee law and social media policies: This helpful post, “How to Tell if Your Social Media Policy is Unlawful,” discusses some of the recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board and how those decisions might affect other companies’ social media policies. “In nearly three-quarters of the cases brought to the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that protects worker’s rights, the Board found 17 out of 23 policies governing the use of social media by employees to be unlawful.”

4. An alternate history of the social web: At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal posted a thought-provoking piece about the power of what he calls “dark social” in “Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong.” He describes “dark social” as platforms like email and instant messaging (which have been around much longer than the big social media platforms), and uses recent data to show that the majority of content sharing occurs through these more difficult to measure outlets versus big social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.