 Hello and welcome to today's webcast. Stand out for the right reasons in the reputation economy. My name is Sarah. I'm from Redback Conferencing, and I will be your facilitator for today's session. Today's webcast is all about taking control of your reputation and building reputational capital. I would like to welcome our host for today, Dr. Narrell East. She's an expert when it comes to reputation and in the media. How are you today, Narrell? I'm very well. Thank you, Sarah. Hello, everybody. Nice to be here. Great to have you here. Now, I really want to kick things off straight away and get into this. Sure. And I think the most simple question to start with is how important is reputation? It's a great question, isn't it? It's what everybody wants to know. And reputation has always been important. I mean, this is nothing new, is it? We've always known that, you know, first impressions count and word of mouth is so important for our organizations and for ourselves as individuals. And nothing's really changed there. What has changed, though, in this digital age we're in, which has just made so many changes to all of our lives, is that now the rest of the world is really controlling the agenda when it comes to our reputation. And they've now got all these tools that they can use to pass on word about us. So that's been the shift. And savvy organizations and savvy businesses are starting to realize this, but it's happening fairly slowly. So I feel really passionate about bringing this to the attention of businesses, of not-for-profit organizations, and of course individuals, because we have personal reputation as well. So that's some of the areas that I'd like to cover when we speak today. Great. So we'll be talking both about organizational reputation and individual reputation? Absolutely, because, you know, they're both critically important. I mean, we're now in what has become known the reputation economy. You might have actually heard this term. If you haven't heard it yet, you probably will really soon. And it's interesting that there's now research. There's an organization called the Reputation Institute, and there are other organizations researching this. And they're finding evidence now what we already suspected, that people are more likely to form and pass on an opinion of you and your organization based on what they've heard from others. And I use heard in the broadest sense, including heard seen on social media, than on what you actually do. So you could be doing the best possible job making fantastic products, delivering great services, doing an amazing performance. But if you're not known for that, and if people aren't talking about that to others, then you're really not being as effective as you need to be now in building your reputation capital. So that's been the interesting shift in this digital age and the reputation economy. But hasn't it always been important, reputation? What's the difference now? It totally has always been important. But now people can see deeply into our organizations in ways that they haven't been able to do that before. So in the past, many organizations and businesses had what I like to call a decide and tell culture. So they made decisions. This might sound familiar to many of you if you work in organizations that things happened behind closed doors and then at a certain point a conscious decision was made that now we're going to tell our stakeholders or our audience about that. And in the past, we could control the channel because there were a lot fewer channels. Maybe we put out a media release or we put out a newsletter or we sent some emails or we had meetings with people and it was a lot more under our control. Well now there's no control but the channels are completely open. Everybody's got access to all these channels. It's kind of like being on a global stage 24 hours a day. We used to talk about our 15 minutes of fame. You might have heard that saying well the 15 minutes now kind of goes on forever because once you're out there in the public eye that reputation is there forever. So a lot of the times I talk to businesses or individuals and they say things have changed because now we've got Facebook and Twitter and I like to remind people that they're just tools. They're just the tools. It's really the deeper changes that those tools have driven that we need to consider. It really is a game changer. So the whole world has changed because the power is now in the hands of the people consuming our messages and that's never really happened before. And it's interesting that as part of all this a lot of business leaders are now saying they recognize that reputation management is critically important but are they necessarily doing what they need to do about that? Well probably not. And we'll talk about some of the steps that we can go through as organizations and as individuals as we go along here. But yeah the key thing is people can see into your business in a way that they couldn't do before and as we know they're not afraid to tell the world what they think and they're doing that every second of the day on all these different channels now. So we know that people as we can see here have access to information about us and our organization on a regular basis whenever they want to. So how can as a business or an organization can we manage our reputation? That's an interesting question isn't it? And the short answer to that is we can't control it. I mean if you just have a look I think we've got a slide here. So this is a model from the Reputation Institute and I love this because it starts to put things in perspective. So can we control our reputation? We actually can't. Because when you think about it what is your reputation? It's the collective perception of what other people think about you. And so now in this digital age we're in that's the whole world isn't it? Our market, our audience is everybody in the world potentially. So that's that collective perception and it's highly subjective what other people think about us. We can't control that. What we can control is who we are and what our organization really stands for what we stand for as an individual and then how we convey that to the rest of the world. So this model from the Reputation Institute shows the balance between the being what a company is or an organization or a business you can substitute that what they say about themselves and then what they actually do and if those things align then that's going to start to influence what other people say about you. I've got a slightly quirky model can I show you that one? This is kind of the serious model I prefer the the three-legged stool model This is my model of reputation this is really important because Sarah when we say the word reputation a lot of people think we're talking about marketing, PR maybe even a bit of spin doctoring and forms part of it but it's only a part so there are many many other things that influence what people think about us and what they say about us. So I liken it to a three-legged stool or a tripod if you're more of a scientific persuasion but let's stick with the stool for now so if you can imagine the first level of the stool and firstly imagine your precious reputation which might be your company, your organization or your own reputation is balanced precariously on the top of the stool so it's holding up your reputation. One leg of the stool is what you say about yourself so this is all of your marketing it's the color of your uniform color of your logo all those outward facing things so that's a critical part of your reputation but it's only one part so a lot of people stop there and think well that's my reputation but that's only the first part the second leg is how people actually directly experience us so this is all of our customer interactions or as individuals how we actually communicate with people and you know we have a business body language we have a personal body language obviously if you're wanting to communicate effectively what you say and your body movements your gestures need to align with that or you're not going to come across as being very authentic the same is true for a business or organization what you say about yourself and how people actually experience you must line up otherwise you've already got two rickety legs of your stool and your reputation is looking a bit dodgy balancing on top but the third leg of the stool and this is the one people often forget about is the main way our reputation is now forming that's what others say to others and you know do you reckon in this digital age that that's got you know out of proportion and is larger than the other two well yeah I believe it has so we can't control that leg of the stool what it can do is do everything in our power to build up those first two legs so making sure that what we're putting out there is it a true reflection of who we are it's positive it's constant it's deliberate it's proactive it's strategic so this is you know really the best marketing the most consistent messaging that we can have to portray who we are to the world and then making sure that we follow that through by our behaviour it's no good having a great you know window dressing if we're not following that through the way we behave so we talk we look at this now and I'm just liking that a lot to word of mouth so there's a lot of talk lately about employee engagement employee culture what your employees say would that also impact your reputation is that something that we really must consider now in this day and age? Absolutely and this is another one of these game changes that I talk about in the reputation economy I mean you don't have to look very far anywhere online to see incidents where organisations have got into a bit of trouble because information's got out and a lot of the time it's got out because somebody within the organisation has put it out there and so the power has really shifted people within our organisation they've got the tools and they've got the inside knowledge to share a whole lot of information with the outside world sometimes it might be information that we preferred that they didn't share but the reality is this is the culture now isn't it so building up that employee loyalty so that they're not likely to do that is critically important but it goes even further than that I mean you know it doesn't take a lot of your reputation damaged by one disgruntled employee and I see this so many times I do a lot of work managing really difficult issues for organisations by far the majority of times the incident is caused within the organisation itself through a disgruntled employee or through a situation that wasn't managed well it wasn't nipped in the bar it was just allowed to fester you know we just kind of pretended it wasn't there we managed it and then it's escalated and all of a sudden it's gone into the public domain then it might be picked up by mainstream media and who knows where it will end up so this is really fascinating and I guess it highlights the importance of making sure that you nurture your employees and if you work in an organisation realising you are that organisation's number one reputation ambassador 24 hours a day all the time and you know there's research around this as well there's this thing called the Edelman Trust Barometer Edelman it's a global public relations firm they do a major piece of research every year they interview people in about 26 countries a large survey and they ask the same question so that they can get trends and it's all around trust and authenticity and one of the questions they ask in this survey is if you were to hear information about a company or an organisation who would be the most credible source of information from that organisation and this is really interesting in 2011 that question was asked and subject matter experts very highly credible which is probably not surprising but about 50% of respondents said the CEO or the organisation or leader highly credible, highly credible which is what you'd expect absolutely, you'd hope wouldn't you regular employees somebody like me were a little bit credible but certainly weren't up there anywhere near the organisation or leader two years later 2013 very interesting results same question was asked in the same survey who'd be the most credible source of information again subject matter experts highly credible so again subject matter experts out there fantastic, keep up the good work but here's the interesting thing organisation or leader, CEO in 2011 about 50% of people said highly credible had fallen quite a lot so the employees regular employees someone like me down here in 2011 2013 had come up so it actually reversed the trend isn't that interesting this is again highlighted in how influenced we are by our peers now I mean, I'm sure most of us when we book travel, when we book restaurants accommodation, you know we check out TripAdvisor, we look at other websites first we read reviews before we go ahead and book absolutely, I mean I booked some accommodation in New York recently then I read the reviews, should've done it the other way around terrible, terrible reviews about this hotel like under no circumstances do not ever stay at this hotel that bad page after page, I actually cancelled the booking and booked somewhere else now if you told me five years ago that I would be that highly influenced by people I'd never even met, I would've laughed but we're highly influenced so this translates into businesses and organisations our employees have an incredible amount of power in influencing what other people think about organisation by their behaviour not just when they're at work well you never know who knows who especially now do you but organisations I'm finding aren't recognising this fact and they're not putting resources into skilling up their employees helping their employees understand the critical role they play in being reputation ambassadors and they're going to pay the price for that unfortunately because a lot of the times reputational issues come from within because employees get frustrated and then they're on social media and then who knows where it ends and I think a lot of this has to do with the internet and social media which we're talking about before we started today and it's had a huge impact in the way that organisations operate as an expert what changes has it also brought about I could imagine a long time ago before social media it seems like it's always been here to be honest in terms of crisis and any sort of reputational crisis how was it dealt with then what has sort of impact has social media made yeah well you know managing a crisis has never been straight forward or easy it certainly was a whole lot more straight forward before social media because again organisations to an extent could control some of the channels the mainstream media they certainly couldn't control but they could control their response so they could get away to an extent with saying a minimal amount or saying certain things whereas now because the truth is out there people can see into what we're doing everything is exposed and also just the speed of things for example in 2006 I worked for Wollongong City Council large local government authority in New South Wales and one day we were working there and the organisation was raided by ICAC the Independent Commission Against Corruption and it was very dramatic ICAC arrived came in they had a camera crew with camera rolling and they went in and started this investigation they evacuated part of the building and it was quite a dramatic scene and I was the communications manager at the time and I was getting media calls and the media were asking me what's going on at your council building part of the building's been evacuated is it a terrorist attack what's going on and I was under orders from the Independent Commission Against Corruption not to release any information not that I knew a lot but whatever information I had I was under strict instructions not to release anything so for a certain time even though all this was going on it was cloak and data stuff and we didn't release information to the media but that was pre-social media only 2006 but pre-social media I like to think can you imagine if that had happened now you would have had employees hanging over the stairwells with their phones recording as the raid happened they would have been tweeting, sharing, liking before I even knew what was going on so the speed of the way information travels I think that's been the biggest shift and it's out there and often we learn about it when it appears on social media rather than being able to manage the message and it's probably just going to get faster absolutely, yeah so my best advice to any organisation about crisis management is always don't have one so it's about putting steps in place to manage that and part of this building reputation capital is that's a huge element of that so when it comes to building this reputation capital is it something that needs to start from the top or as employees what can we do to assist our organisation to make sure that if a crisis does happen or something like that we can bounce back well I think it's both I think it needs to be driven from the top absolutely but make no mistake regular employees or employees at any level have a critical role to play so it's no good the leadership of an organisation saying one thing and the employees doing something else because the employees have the power at their fingertips to spread conflicting messages so it's got to be commitment at the top followed through with genuine action throughout the organisation so there are some steps that we can go through about you know how to build reputation capital do you want to start going through those let's have a look at that now so I like to use the acronym is so building reputation capital about having big ears that's memorable it is it is it is and you know remember there are some good reasons why we need to be building reputation capital I mean it's those companies I mean there's research now that's shown there's a link between reputation and ROI so you know the companies with the strongest reputations having greater market share attracting the best employees being able to charge higher prices for not for profits all about attracting more government grants more sponsorships and also if there are any problems organisations with the strongest reputation have a much better chance of managing those issues and not being decimated by problems being able to bounce back and then at an individual level obviously people with the best reputations are going to get the best opportunities you know the promotions the great jobs being offered the great projects but also people are going to be drawn to you you'll have people wanting to be on your team we want to do business with people who we've heard about who have strong reputations so that's even more important now so does this is model also apply to us as individuals absolutely it does yep yep so the first part of the is model is e for essence this is the essence of your your brand the essence of who you stand for and I'm sure you've experienced this Sarah to in the many people you talk to that sometimes when we think about about branding and reputation people think it's it's something you can just stick on the outside and you know this is this is very deep within the organization that this is about being really really clear on what you stand for and that goes beyond just what's in the mission statement yeah what is it that we're actually here to do and as an individual what is it that I'm actually here to do not just your job title what does that mean you know I am the such and such manager which means yeah you need to break that down and there's a great analogy I like to use about the US space program in the 1960s that they had this absolutely crystal clear purpose or essence that was to put a man on the moon and I say man because it was at the time I put a man on the moon and it didn't matter if you were the chief space engineer or the cleaner you came to work every day with that absolute mission and that was the essence of that organization and I like to say to businesses to teams and to people what's your man on the moon what is it that you're here to do so I think you know this goes back to being really clear about that because yeah sorry is that something that we should be communicating as businesses and you know you go to a lot of organizations websites and they have mission statements vision statements which are quite long and very wordy at times is it worthwhile just put in a one you know five words or something on there that really does communicate your essence definitely I think it starts with being inside the organization and knowing what you're there to do but then yes exactly finding a way to be known for that finding a way to be known for that and that may not necessarily be the same as what's on your website or what's in your mission statement sometimes they're quite hollow words I'm talking about the authentic real purpose for why we're here the man on the moon so it starts with that so it doesn't matter if it's a large organization a small business or a person I like to go through this exercise of getting people to reflect on what their purpose is I did this actually last week with a group of women leaders and it was amazing these were some heavy hitters amazing women some of them had never actually considered this they knew their job title and they knew the stuff that they did the outputs but they hadn't ever really thought about the outcome what are they trying to do exactly and this was almost a higher purpose some of them were almost embarrassed to think about their higher purpose but I'm thinking well isn't that why you're here if that's not why you're here then why are you doing what you do once you start to connect with that then helps to drive the messages you put to the outside world and it starts to become a lot more authentic than just the color of the logo or the window dressing that you put on the outside so that's our essence so start with that the A stands for awareness now this creature it's a South American fish called an anablep and I like to look at it for a little while it's weird isn't it it's actually got four eyes now I didn't come up with this analogy I heard somebody else use this example in a different way and I thought you know I'm going to take this and apply this to reputation because it works really well so an anablep has four eyes and so two of the eyes are above the water checking out for predators and then the other two are below the water looking out for food which is kind of cool when you think about this is how we need to be when it comes to our reputation we need a set of eyes scanning the horizon to be really really aware of what's being said about us whether we're a business or whether we're a person you need to know what is being said about you by others you can't necessarily control it and you may not necessarily be able to discover everything some of those conversations won't be in an open forum but you need to have a very clear idea otherwise you're just blundering along in the dark and not really knowing what it is you're dealing with and then it's a matter of putting into practice what I call constant weeding when you identify an issue that might impact your reputation it's doing something about it straight away and I guess it applies I know in the past when social media really did become big they get negative posts or something on their social media pages as an organisation and how not responding or deleting is possibly the worst thing you can do isn't it that's right it does become difficult if you're a large organisation and there's a barrage but we can't ignore this because this is our currency it's the reputation economy so we've got to find a way to resource that to respond appropriately so that's the external the eyes above the water but we've also got the other set of eyes and this is the eyes within and this is just as important so for an organisation it's about really knowing what's going on and again the number of crises and issues that I've been called in to help resolve where the problem's actually been caused from within the organisation is amazing you know we are so good at shooting ourselves in the foot I always say never underestimate people's potential to do dumb things and they will but then organisations try to cover it up or they pretend it hasn't happened and don't do anything about it and then as individuals again it's also being really aware inwardly of how are we travelling, how are we performing are we really delivering on our promises how are people actually experiencing us if there are areas where we need to develop then being prepared to do the work and develop those these are the things that are going to help build reputation capital so again far beyond just the pretty stuff on the outside you know it's an inside job it starts from within I take that a step further this is another model that I like to work with and you can see the bottom left you're courting disaster this is you're not aware of what's going on with your reputation and you're not taking any action you're courting disaster it's a matter of time before some major reputation or problem come your way or you could be very aware but you're not actually taking any action I call that burying your head in the sand so you know there's a problem but you're kind of going la la la let's just ignore it and I see plenty of that in businesses and organisations or you could be very active you're running around and you're doing all this social media and you're putting stuff out there but you haven't done any work to actually gauge what your reputation is like to start with and I call that getting the landmines you're running around and you might be missing disaster but only by a little bit sooner or later something's going to go wrong or you could be really aware and really active and strategic and that's truly building reputation capital so it's a matter of having both of those elements so awareness is important needs to be coupled with action as well hope that's making sense to everybody so when it comes to becoming aware is it just you know within your organisation you're taking a step back sometimes and just focusing on what's happening inside as opposed to having this whole external view is that the only thing you can do? It definitely has to be systematic and strategic so difficult as this will be because we're all busy doing our day jobs but you know this is the reputation economy and it's critical the companies that are and the organisations that are succeeding at this and have the strongest reputations and this is research from the Reputation Institute to the use of building reputation so they actually have allocated time and resources to exactly this stuff to making sure that they're keeping on top of what are people saying about us and what's going on inside they have a process whether it's a weekly meeting or some other mechanism where they're talking about what are the potential issues that could crop up in our business or our organisation rather than waiting till it's exploded into some major problem and this proactively they're weaning the garden constantly and they're reaping the rewards because their reputation's growing positively standing out for the right reasons as I say not the wrong ones because they're keeping on top of these things so I think we're up to the R of our years so we'll move on and this is relationships the world now runs on relationships and obviously we're heavily networked I don't know about you Sarah you're in lots of different networks to within an inch of our life but it goes further than that we're actually now in an entire ecosystem of influence so we're interacting and interwoven in our relationships with so many people around the world because we can connect with them through social media and anything that happens in one part of the ecosystem will ripple through and have an impact elsewhere in the ecosystem so another key strategy for building a reputation is to really focus in on your relationships to make sure that you're really thinking about who are the people in my ecosystem who are the ones that I need to nurture the relationships with and just on that we just have a question that's come through from Nat so Nat asks in terms of building reputation how much of a role can LinkedIn play in this? Fantastic question I mean LinkedIn is one of the many tools available to us LinkedIn is fantastic in the business and corporate world I mean it's like the corporate Facebook because now we can see who's who in the zoo you can easily get on there and see who are the key people that you might want to connect with and you've got that great mechanism on LinkedIn I don't know what it's called but you can look at someone's profile and you can see how they're connected with you it's like a tree almost they might be one removed from you but there's somebody a mutual contact so you can contact that person and ask for an introduction I always say to people though let's not you know face to face is still the preferred method of communication I always advise people if possible conversations where you can see people's eyeballs so LinkedIn is a great introduction opportunity but follow up in person make those approaches in person and start to build rapport and relationships and I guess now there's a lot of people who have questions published in posts and insights if you like can that play into wanting to establish yourself or your organisation as a thought leader within the industry? that's a really interesting question this is about being great at what you do and then being known for being great so at an individual level and at a corporate level one of the most effective ways you can do that is to take steps to establish yourself as a thought leader exactly what we've said being clear on who you are and what you stand for and then communicating that to the world through the content you publish through the way you behave with people the way you interact, what you share I mean you see people sharing all kinds of random stuff on LinkedIn but yeah it doesn't really seem LinkedIn appropriate sometimes so I'd really suggest that that's what you're wanting to do sharing content on LinkedIn and I highly recommend that as a way of building your voice make sure it's consistent with what you stand for so really think about the essence and choose content, vet it don't just share any old thing I mean I won't share anything that's a blatant sales pitch you start to read it and then three paragraphs and there's the sales pitch don't share that but really useful valuable content that's linked directly to your essence absolutely that can start to build up a really strong profile and it's starting to build up as a thought leader is a great way to build reputation capital great question so that was the R of our relationship R of our ears relationships so don't neglect the good old fashioned way of connecting with people sometimes we get caught up in this dizzying array of technology and it's fantastic that it's there but sometimes the old school things are great as well sometimes I recommend to CEOs of organizations just have a conversation with that person and they look at me like I'm a genius conversation this is all about people connecting with people we're now fortunate enough we've got great tools to do that but we've still got to connect so connect in an authentic way and that starts with being clear building these relationships shall we move on to S and this is our systems so this is what I was talking about most reputable companies in the world most reputable organizations have systems for doing this they have strategies they have a reputation strategy they have a communication strategy if they're going to deal with media social media they have a strategy for doing that it's not just done randomly or in an ad hoc or reactive manner and a lot of the time I see many businesses just do that randomly have a good idea let's put it out there I encourage you to think about doing this in a strategic way and similarly with individuals if you want to build your profile build your reputation sit down and think about some objectives and set yourself some goals and some time frames and it might be I'm going to share three different types of content I'm linked in every week but it's going to be content that's linked to my essence it might be becoming aware that hang on I need to build my skills as a communicator build my skills in networking so doing something about that going to networking events and practicing or getting some coaching and mentoring or doing a course or a webinar yeah so this is part of this internal awareness and then your systems are actually putting it into action so reputation doesn't happen by accident it's an inside job and it's built in steps that's why I like the Russian dolls having the steps that all fit together hopefully that makes sense to everybody yes so now that we've gone through is hope everyone is familiar with that now what are the risks of not paying attention to your reputation whether you are an organization or an individual what's the worst that could happen I'm a little bit scared to ask that question exactly we don't have to look very far do we to see some of the disasters that can happen if we don't pay attention to our reputation I love this analogy when I was in New York recently there was this Apple store that's set up in Grand Central Station in New York so this beautiful historic building gorgeous lighting and they've set up an Apple store and it's not a store with walls around it they've actually just put the store within the building it's really cool and it's this fantastic kind of morphing of old and new cutting edge technology with the Apple store and this grand beautiful old building that's what we've got to be like agile and we've got to be able to take opportunities and I guess communicate these kind of old style values of relationship building with the latest technology and if we can do that we are going to be fantastic reputation builders for our organization if not we risk becoming dinosaurs and just being extinct or having some sort of major reputation or disaster so you don't have to look very far at the examples of organizations who have got this wrong who haven't managed their relationships well who aren't clear on what they stand for who haven't responded don't have systems in place and they've ended up in social media storms that's going to have long term impacts on their reputation can you bounce back from that that depends depends on your reputation to start with and how well you manage it but it's not easy far better to have a good reputation in the first place and manage things as they crop up so I'm sure nobody wants to be extinct like a dinosaur as a business as a not-for-profit and as an individual you don't want your career to be extinct so the best way to guard against that is to consciously strategically deliberately go through these steps that I've outlined and build reputation capital so it's about prevention isn't it absolutely like most things when I used to market myself as the crunch time communicator because I worked in the media for a long time I was the go-to girl when things went horribly wrong people would call me and it was a bit like calling the paramedics when things were serious and I got to thinking you know this is crazy I want to work at the other end and show businesses and people how to prevent this because 90% of the time it was totally preventable they'd made a mistake or something had happened and they hadn't responded well or they had poor relationships with people already so of course when people got angry if they already had bad relationships it went from bad to worse by putting some of these steps back in the beginning it was preventative you've got to be prepared to do the work but my question is do you want a great reputation and I'm sure you do then this really needs to be a focus and something that you build in to every day building into organisational decision making and also in the way you operate as an individual well that brings us close to the end closing comments from yourself closing comments don't underestimate the power of reputation I work with businesses every day who haven't heeded this advice who've paid the price and then take a long time to get back on top if they ever do so far, far better to take the steps really be aware of what's going on and take action and put strategies in place and don't neglect traditional media is still there make that work in with your social media but don't just focus on the window dressing know who you are but be great and then be known for being great hopefully that's been helpful today I think that's been very very helpful thank you so much Nerole it's been great chatting with you and thank you everyone online for watching great insights out of today for not only yourself but possibly even your organization so thank you once again for joining we hope to see you at future business skills events and enjoy the rest of your day bye for now thank you bye