All posts by Shannon M. Wilkinson

About Shannon M. Wilkinson

Shannon Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Reputation Communications.

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CEOs and Online Reputation Risks

“It seems that just about every day a chief executive, politician or other prominent figure is apologizing for something,” Aaron Sorkin observed in a Dealbook post announcing his new “Apology Watch” coverage and hashtag, which we mentioned a couple weeks ago. This “personal and public exploration of the authentic apology,” as Sorkin’s collaborator Dov Seidman describes it, will be a fascinating project to follow. They’ve decided to focus on the “apologizing,” but that’s only half of the equation. The other half is the “something” that made an apology necessary.

Behind the stream of apologies that Sorkin references are statements and actions that expose some CEOs and other leaders as out of touch with the opinions—and feelings—of the people their companies target as consumers. Tweeting about venture capitalist Tom Perkins’ much-criticized Wall Street Journal letter, economist Justin Wolfers describes this problem as the “rich-dude bubble.”

Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer who commissioned the world’s largest private sailing yacht and authored a romance novel titled Sex and the Single Zillionaire, has continued to defend his letter, but that’s a perilous position for many other leaders.

The human element

Take AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, for example. In linking changes in AOL’s 401(k) plan to the health care costs of “two AOL-ers that had distressed babies,” Armstrong focused on the bottom line while overlooking the important human element, which was later described in detail by Deanna Fei, one of the babies’ mothers. And last year Armstrong faced extensive criticism for firing an employee during a conference call while around 1,000 others listened. Sorkin’s “Apology Watch” analysis found the CEO’s most recent apology to be sincere. His article’s concluded with a quote from Fei. “I think it’s legitimate and necessary to have a public discussion about health care expenditures, but this has to be done with sensitivity and mindfulness of the human lives at stake,” she said.

Echoing Sorkin, Bloomberg.com’s Jeff Green says Armstrong “is on a long list of corporate bosses who put their trust in an apology to contain fallout from an embarrassing public statement.” Green offers a list of similarly problematic episodes. They included AIG CEO Robert Menmosche “equating congressional criticism of the insurer’s bonuses during the financial crisis with lynchings in the Deep South.”And Google’s Eric Schmidt, who suggested “that people who worried Google Street view was invading their privacy by taking pictures of their homes should ‘just move.’” Fortune’s Claire Zillman observes that business executives seem to be replacing politicians as “the ones who seem to be truly disconnected from everyday Americans,” citing astronomical executive pay and how wealth can distort one’s outlook as the likely cause.

Fallout

“If the CEO is getting mostly negative publicity, it is very hard to get positive coverage on the organization as a whole,” according to a study by the Institute for Public Relations. Given that connection, today’s CEOs may be well advised to cultivate an outlook that addresses the values and concerns of the broader public. In stark contrast to Tom Perkins, for instance, venture capitalist and early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer has advocated for raising the minimum wage. And, in Zillman’s Fortune article, Harry Kraemer, clinical professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, offers some practical advice for staying grounded: “You better have a few people—a spouse, best friend, or sibling—who won’t let you forget who you really are and where you came from.”

 
 
Branding, Reputation Case Study, Social Media, , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you scroll through this blog’s archives, you’ll find many different examples of how being authentic is central to successful online reputation management. But there are few better examples of the value of authenticity than Gary Vaynerchuk.

If you’ve read David Segal’s recent New York Times piece—or any of the countless other profiles on Vaynerchuk —you know the remarkable story of his rise from the savvy social media manager/über marketer for a New Jersey wine retailer to one of the top branding and social media thought leaders. In today’s climate, where building a personal brand has become an almost universal concern, we can all benefit by looking at the strategies and tools that have fueled his success. Loud, brash and profane, Vaynerchuk’s personality doesn’t appeal to everyone. But he doesn’t try to.

Uncompromising authenticity has been at the heart of his approach since his breakout video blog, Wine Library TV, which Segal describes as “Mr. Vaynerchuk sitting at a table in his office, demystifying chardonnays, rieslings and other wines by describing them in terms that any mook could understand.” The blog not only presents Vaynerchuk as an unvarnished, passionate and accessible wine enthusiast, but also demonstrates his shrewd understanding of his medium. “My high quality content definitely factored in, but that might not have mattered had I not also made native content—authentic content perfectly crafted for that particular new platform, YouTube,” he reflects.

Early Adopter of Twitter

As an early adopter of Twitter, Vaynerchuk has harnessed it with a similar combination of candidness and insight. “It was the platform that came most naturally to me, because it was perfectly suited for small bursts of quick­fire conversation and idea exchanges,” he writes in his latest book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World. Vaynerchuk understands that the platform is about more than just “microblogging.” It’s about engaging directly—or, as he puts it, “creating context.”

“Twitter is the cocktail party of the Internet—a place where listening well has tremendous benefits,” he observes in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. And listen he does. “About 90 percent of Mr. Vaynerchuk’s tweets are direct replies to people who have written to or about him,” Segal points out in the Times. “I always say that our success wasn’t due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral,” Vaynerchuk wrote in an Entrepreneur article, “but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships,”

Content Is King

Vaynerchuk also emphasizes the importance of creating content. A recent Forbes article went so far as to call it “the cost of entry to relevance in today’s society” and encouraged people to create as much as possible. “It literally doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re not producing content, you basically don’t exist,” he has declared. Vaynerchuk’s characteristic hyperbole aside, this argument has resonance when it comes to online reputation management.

If you don’t publish content that provides accurate and appropriate information about yourself, your company, area of expertise or organization, you are not just losing an opportunity to build your brand—you are endangering it, essentially relinquishing control of your online image anyone else who decides to post content about you. Bringing together engagement and authenticity as well as content and context, Vaynerchuk’s approach highlights some valuable tools and strategies for managing one’s reputation online. G.E.’s Linda Boff may sum it up best. “When I think about Gary, I think about scrappiness before anything else,” she tells Segal in his Times piece. “He lives his own life out loud.”  

 
 
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Today, Business Insurance published an article about how global expansion adds to companies’ reputational risks.

I was interviewed for the piece. An excerpt:

“While the speed at which information can travel through social media can enhance reputation risk, social media can be a valuable tool in managing reputation risks, said Shannon M. Wilkinson, CEO of Reputation Communications in New York. Social media audits can provide important information before a company enters a market, she said.

“Social media provides a barometer into all those kinds of things,” she said. “It can be done quickly. It can be done cheaply.”

Such social media research can provide information on perceptions of products, companies or marketing campaigns, as well as an opportunity to learn from competitors’ experiences, Ms. Wilkinson said.

“They can go to Twitter and they can see what their peer group’s doing,” she said. “It’s a very good way of observing best and worst practices.”

It also can provide information on whether signing a particular celebrity spokesperson might be a big reputation risk mistake.

“He might be a face for a different kind of product, but not in this area,” Ms. Wilkinson said. “All of this is researchable and it’s not so much about making a judgment; it’s about determining what is the most appropriate affiliation for your company or your product launch.”

A full copy of the article is available at Business Insurance.

 
 
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Papa Johns

Since founding Papa John’s in the back of his father’s bar in 1984, John Schnatter has built his business into a leading international pizza delivery chain. Its reputation for customer service, quality and value has fueled that growth and distinguished it from competitors like Domino’s and Pizza Hut.

Papa John’s has deftly built and maintained that reputation, but recently there have been challenges. The first challenge occurred earlier this year, when a racial slur on a receipt at Harlem Papa John’s went viral.  Papa John’s quickly stepped in to protect its image. Just a day after the offensive receipt appeared online, the chain took to Twitter and Facebook to apologize and announce that the employee responsible had been fired.

Politics and Pizza

The pizza chain has been less successful in its response to the more complex controversy surrounding Schnatter’s own comments about the Affordable Care Act. Discussing his view of the health care law over the summer and after the presidential election, Schnatter drew extensive media coverage and triggered both positive and negative reactions on social media. He attempted to clarify what he had said in a Huffington Post blog post, but his explanation doesn’t appear to have succeeded in swaying public perception or distancing the Papa John’s brand from such a heated political issue. A recent YouGov BrandIndex report found that the controversy has negatively impacted the chain’s reputation. Chicago journalist Edward McClelland may have said it best: “Everyone eats pizza. And when you’re trying to sell a product to everyone, it’s not smart to alienate the 51 percent who voted for a winning presidential candidate.”

Papa John’s doesn’t need to look further than its own recent successes for a strategy that might help repair its reputation. In 2008, after drawing ire and boycott threats from Cleveland Cavaliers fans for t-shirts that insulted NBA star LeBron James, Papa John’s made up for it by selling pizzas to Cleveland residents for just 23 cents and donating to the Cavaliers Youth Fund. That approach earned the chain one of PRSA’s Silver Anvil Awards for Crisis Communications. Americans may clash when it comes to sports teams and politics, but, to borrow from the quote above, everyone eats pizza.

 
 
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Pepsi has announced a trail-blazing, $50 million collaboration with superstar Beyonce. The deal combines Pepsi advertising and marketing with an estimated $25 million-dollar creative content development fund to support the singer’s own conceptual projects.  That’s the interesting part. “For Pepsi, the goal is to enhance its reputation with consumers by acting as something of an artistic patron instead of simply paying for celebrity endorsements,” reports Ben Sinsario.

Affiliating with Beyonce as an artistic patron will align Pepsi with far more benefits than a standard commercial endorsement. Pepsi will attain luster from the sheen reflected by Beyonce’s creativity, blue-chip image and relationships with the biggest names in entertainment. Her husband Jay-Z is a powerhouse on all levels. It is a brilliant relationship for Pepsi.

Arts Patronage Has Always Been the Ticket to Superstar Prestige

The patronage aspect of the deal revisits corporate support of the arts campaigns during the ‘70s and ‘80s. American Express, Exxon and other major companies underwrote national tours of blockbuster art exhibitions and dance companies. Such sponsorships aligned them with wealthy, educated cultural audiences.  Many corporations replaced arts sponsorships with sports underwriting.

Arts patronage has always been a conduit to status. But affiliating with contemporary culture – art, film, literature, music – confers a cool factor like no other.  (The star-studded Miami Art Basel fair, which closed yesterday, attests to that. So do the dozens of private jets that flood Miami’s airports just before it opens each year.) In supporting Beyonce’s creative projects, Pepsi is enabling her with a bigger platform for her creative ideas. We trust it isn’t just another a commercial deal.

Consumers’ Desire for Authenticity Influenced the Concept

Brad Jakeman, president of PepsiCo’s global beverage group, attributed their decision to authenticity.

“Consumers are seeking a much greater authenticity in marketing from the brands they love,” he told Ben Sisario. “It’s caused a shift in the way we think about deals with artists, from a transactional deal to a mutually beneficial collaboration.”

In other words: consumers are tired of being sold to. Pepsi and Beyonce’s management and marketing teams have responded using the key principles of reputation management: authenticity and trust. We anticipate they’ll deliver the goods, too.

 
 
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Sallie Krawcheck is a top candidate to become the next head of the SEC, according to Dealbook, but it’s not just her record and resilience as a Wall Street executive that’s put her in the running.

Since she began tweeting last spring, Krawcheck has gained more than 11,000 followers. On LinkedIn she’s attracted an even larger audience—75,000 and counting. “She has drawn a significant following with her conversational style and posts on investment issues,” Dealbook says, referring to an earlier article in which Krawcheck called her move “part of a larger effort to style herself as an industry analyst” and “lend her Wall Street experience to the broader debate about the industry’s evolution.” Already among LinkedIn’s top “Thought Leaders” and Business Insider’s “101 Finance People You Have To Follow On Twitter,” she’s clearly had a great deal of success with her strategy.

Social Media Savvy

A big part of that success comes from Krawcheck’s deft use of social media to take ownership of her image and message. In the past, she would have had to rely on a public relations intermediary to arrange interviews and keep her name out there, as many prominent figures do. However, she has used social media to take more direct control of her voice and reach a larger audience at the same time. In a recent RIABiz.com article Dina Hampton examines how Krawcheck “used those months of technical unemployment to cultivate a distinct and intimate online voice that may, industry watchers say, deftly position her for her next move.” Speaking to Hampton, Gregory FCA Communications’ Joe Anthony adds that Krawcheck’s strategy has “broadened her footprint to where more people are recognizing her beyond the financial services space” and “gone from being seen as a sharp mind within wealth management/banking to a thought leader and business titan.”

While she may describe herself in her Twitter profile as a “current mom” and “crazed UNC basketball fan,” a closer look at Krawcheck’s online presence shows that her approach is far from amateur. In addition to regularly sharing useful links and poignant thoughts on both Twitter and LinkedIn, she has self-published popular posts like “Lessons Learned in Leading During a Crisis” and “What I Learned When I Got Fired (the First Time)” and penned op-eds for outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Politico.

Those posts have given her a chance to share her own perspective and narrative regarding her previous experience, while the op-eds appear to be setting the stage for her next move. “Lately Krawcheck has been peppering the media with her thoughts and strong recommendations about how to address, if not solve, the gigantic, chronic, almost genetic, ills of the global financial industry,” The Daily Beast’s Allan Dodds Frank wrote in October. “If she can continue her nonpartisan stance,” Frank observed, “she might be the ideal person to be in charge of consumer protection, be nominated to the Securities & Exchange Commission or to a Treasury Department job.”

Setting the Stage

Her undergraduate degree at the UNC School of Journalism has likely helped Krawcheck communicate effectively, but perhaps more important is how she has applied the same strategies that made her one of Wall Street’s top female executives to her social media endeavors. “The secrets of Krawcheck’s success, however, hinge on her social skills,” Heidi N. Moore wrote in 2009, adding that “she has built a reputation as Mrs. Clean” and combined “a warm interest in others’ feelings, an obsession with preparation” and with “frank talk and open ambition.”

Speculation about where she’ll end up next will surely continue, and there’s no guarantee that she’ll be tapped as the next SEC chair. But one thing is certain: as one of the first major names in the banking world to dive headfirst into social media, Sallie Krawcheck has reaped the vast potential of an open and savvy online strategy.

 
 
Crisis Management, , , , , , , , , ,

Sexual assault is epidemic on college campuses, but the New York Times’ Richard Pérez-Peña reports that recently appointed Amherst College president Biddy Martin is poised for a major breakthrough on this controversial issue.

Colleges and universities have often been silent, even secretive, when it comes to cases of on-campus sexual assault, according to the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity. But striving to preserve the image and standing necessary to compete in the world of higher education, can compromise not just standards of accountability and transparency, but also the safety and welfare of their students.

“In spite of a recent Department of Education directive requiring schools to investigate sexual assault under Title IX, many schools would rather cover up a reported rape to maintain the school’s reputation,” Whitman College student Rachel Alexander recently wrote in a blog post for The Nation. That sentiment has been echoed widely by many others, including a former Amherst student whose account of her own horrifying experience “dominated campus conversations and “drew worldwide attention,” according to Pérez-Peña.

Agents for change

Amherst’s Dr. Martin has emerged as a leader on this issue, quickly moving to address the incident on her campus openly and on multiple fronts, including with a direct and candid letter to the Amherst community and an ongoing “Action Checklist” documenting the steps that the college is taking to deal with the issue.

Dr. Martin previously sought ambitious changes at the University of Madison-Wisconsin and Cornell University with mixed results, but her latest move is likely her biggest and boldest yet, bringing together her scholarship in gender studies with leadership prowess and steely resolve. “The events unfolding at Amherst could be the catalyst for unprecedented change there,” writes Inside Higher Ed’s Allie Grasgreen. “Martin’s response should be a model for other universities,” according to Colby Bruno of the Victim Rights Law Center. The president struck a similar note in her aforementioned letter: “Amherst, given its values, its commitment to community, and its size should be a model of education, prevention, and effective response when violations occur.”

Biddy Martin has shown no signs that she’ll trade in such principles for a more conventional and superficial public relations strategy, and administrators on college campuses everywhere would be wise to follow suit. “It’s an incredible opportunity to have a conversation about this issue,” she told the Times. “These are the kinds of things I think we’re alive to think about.”

 
 
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Earlier this month CNN’s Anderson Cooper revealed that he is gay in a letter to The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan.

According to the Huffington Post, Cooper’s decision to officially come out followed “a long discussion with his team making sure he wasn’t committing career suicide.” With rumors that Cooper may soon marry, that letter could be part of a larger plan to open up about his personal life while closely managing the tone and context of that revelation.

A Good Choice

The decision to make the announcement was a good choice. “I’ve always believed that who a reporter votes for, what religion they are, who they love, should not be something they have to discuss publicly,” Cooper states in his letter to Sullivan. But he also acknowledges that keeping his sexual orientation private had the potential to harm his reputation for honest and accurate journalism. “It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something –something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.”

Taking Control of His Message

By choosing to share the news in a thoughtful and eloquent letter to Sullivan, a friend and himself an openly gay journalist, Cooper took control of his message and preempted any threat to his reputation that his previous secrecy had posed. By doing so he was also able to frame the announcement in a way that underscores his values and reputation, both personally and professionally. “I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues,” Cooper wrote, adding that he has always tried to keep his private affairs and identity out of his journalism. “I’ve never wanted to be any kind of reporter other than a good one, and I do not desire to promote any cause other than the truth.”

Cooper also minimized the story’s ability to expand by making the announcement while he was in Botswana, out of the reach of the media.

The way Anderson Cooper has handled this is a model of how to get in front of potentially controversial personal issues.  On a broader level, Cooper has set an important example by treating sexual orientation as a subject that is not relevant to public or professional reputation.