Reputation Security: Looking at corporate reputation, reputational risk and reputational risk assessment?

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

Its quite simply the sum of what all the people and companies below think about your organisation:

You

Staff

Criminals

Competitors

Suppliers

Shareholders

Customers

Partners

Professional Service Providers

Regulatory Bodies & Government

These people and organisations base their assessment of your reputation on the following:

Identity of the organisation
Statements about vision and strategy
Actions of the organisation
Perceptions of the organisation from others
Quantitive Performance, in terms of profitability and profile of risk
Qualititive Performance in terms of social responsibility
Technology, research and innovation capability

Reputational risk is therefore the potential loss in reputation that leads to a series of impacts
to your organisation, including:

Loss of income
Costly litigation
Negative publicity
Decline in customer base
Reduction in market share

Decline in share price
Decline in organisation belief
Higher staff turnover & harder to hire high calibre managers

Additional costs associated with recovering reputation back

Reputational risk assessment is an estimate of the organisations current standing relative to each of the individuals, groups and companies mentioned above and its ability to sustain operations successfully within the current environment.

Reputation Security:: A formal approach to intangible risk management!

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

Why is it so simple for a company to think about operational risks, yet hard for them to understand the risks that threaten their company reputation? Could this be attributed to a lack of ability to perceive intangible risks, as opposed to more obvious tangible risks.

Don't they understand that the intangibles are far more likely to threaten share-holder value that any other form of risk?

We recall the cases where intangible risks has threatened shareholder value, such as the finger that alledegly found its way into a bowl of chilli at a fast food restuarant or the CEO who had allegedly been watching pornography on his computer (which he denied infatically). Or where the claims manager of a well respected underwriting firm was fired for setting up bogus policy holder accounts and making claims through them.

In each of these cases it is not difficult to understand just how devasting the outcome would be, both in terms of the negative media exposure in the market and the resulting financial losses.

In fact the impact could be far worse to the brand itself, hampering its development for many years to come.

Much of the shortcomings of todays business managers emanate from a general disregard for assessing the risk of intangibles, prefering to concentrate on those risks that can be more easily identified. The tangible risks, such as infrastructure, finance and product development.

At Brand Killer Robots we call for the introduction of a new formal approach to the identification, visualisation and assessment of risk in the area of intangibles - in order to reduce risk to shareholder value.

If you would like to know more about our work in this area: email sryan@intrench.com

Reputations corrupted by unethical SEO marketers

Brand Killer Robots reveals ::

SEO or search engine optimisation is a planning and implementation process for optimising the positioning of your online resources relative to search engines, in order to improve the quantity, quality and conversion of visitors to your website. In short, you want to use SEO to increase the volume of people visiting your website referred by organic search engines and to turn as many visitors as possible into paying customers. You achieve this by using SEO techniques to attract higher and relevant ranking in the target search engine and therefore your advert appears nearer the top of the search results.
A Search engine optimiser requires multi-disciplinary skills that include marketing expertise, web development, business analytics and a good understanding of writing search engine friendly web copy.

Like the vast majority of pionnering fields SEO suffers from a general lack of agreed standards and is therefore at the mercy of a great many unethical practices and associated conmen. In fact, as search engines become more sophisticated, they are more and more able to detect unethical SEO practices and have taken steps to ban websites they deem unethical from their listings.

For any investor or executive, the first real question for selecting SEO is WHO SHOULD WE HIRE? Choose your SEO service provider carefully. It could cost you your reputation online if you don't and this may take you sometime to turn around.

A Trojan program that destroys reputations

Brand Killer Robots reveal ::

Security experts have confirmed the detection of a new form of trojan that targets computers owned by company executives. This new form of virus is designed to open up access to porn, which is then downloaded and left on the executives hard disk drive. Police authorities are alerted to the elicit material via anonymous email. It is thought that the new trojan was designed by black hats and sold to at least one company, who used it to discredit the directors at a major corporation.