Key management trend: Reputation management

I was recently interviewed for a report created by the executive forum Vistage, titled 12 Trends That Will Define Business in the “New Normal”.

One of the key trends covered in the report in which they drew on my thoughts is reputation management, excerpted below.

Trend 7: Reputation Management

Just as you have to keep your credit score in good standing to own a credit card, you’ll soon have to keep you online reputation in good standing if you want to be trusted or have influence online.

“Reputation measurement will become a massive economic enabler as we get better at assessing it,” says futurist Ross Dawson, who authors the Trends in the Living Networks blog.

Just as you have to keep your credit score in good standing to own a credit card, you’ll soon have to keep you online reputation in good standing if you want to be trusted or have influence online.

“Reputation measurement will become a massive economic enabler as we get better at assessing it,” says futurist Ross Dawson, who authors the Trends in the Living Networks blog.

Already, within certain domains, user reputations are displayed. eBay displays a “reliability ranking” for each seller based on how much positive feedback they get from buyers, and “Ask Vistage” displays a bar above each user’s name that shows how much they participate.

A few sites, such as klout.com, attempt to score reputations. But none yet has cracked the code of offering a comprehensive reputation score.

“Assessing a business’s online reputation is becoming more sophisticated,” says Dawson. “Soon we’ll be able to create measures that tell how trustworthy and knowledgeable a person or business is based on their online networks, as well as positive or negative reviews, information they share, how that information is ranked and which sites link to it.”

Look for reputation management to become as important to driving business online as search engine optimization is now. For small business owners, you should start building your reputation and your business’s reputation now. According to Dawson, here’s what you can do to start:

• Find out what’s being said about you now. There are many free tools to discover this.

• Participate in social media so that you become more visible and have a “right of reply.”

• Ask those who genuinely like what you do to recommend you or your work on online sites.

• Don’t do anything online you wouldn’t want people to find out about—because they will.

Start building your reputation early to get ahead of the trend.