It’s not hard to find examples of the cost of poor reputation management. Twitter may be a particularly outrageous case. After all, destroying much of a 44B$ asset in less than a year ought to be prizeworthy.
But it’s by no means alone.
A recent Forbes article describes how the Trusted Talent Partner award helps freelance entrepreneurs to manage, protect, and advance the reputation of their marketplace. It does so by enabling platform clients to provide feedback on their work with a given platform, and offers platform teams hard data to understand clients’ experience and what changes will help them preserve and advance their business relationships.
But feedback, while essential, is only part of the job to be done as Clay Christensen might describe it. Reputation management is a critical and multi-faceted exercise. Without it, even the best companies are endangered by actions and reactions that destroy good will and leave companies vulnerable to erosion and mischief by competitors and bad actors.
So how – and how well – are you managing your platform’s reputation? Here are six principles to guide your actions:
1. Do you know your reputation now among your key stakeholders?
Every company has a reputation, even those so new, little known, or merely remembered as “what’s their name again?” It’s beyond important to know where your freelance marketplace stands in the minds – and preferences – of your target customers. Smart platforms like Catalant understand that reputation management is a continuous process of reconnecting with clients and partners on an ongoing basis, understanding their experience of working with your company, and regularly acquainting stakeholders with what’s new, different, and on the drawing board. Keep in mind that your reputation is impacted by factors beyond your control, but not beyond your influence: all companies are affected by external factors like the “trust gap” in business. As PwC points out in a recent client survey, “business executives overestimate how much they are trusted.”
2. What’s your story?
In generations past, most US school children learned that George Washington was scrupulously honest (“I cannot tell a lie”), Nathan Hale was bravely loyal to the young American cause on pain of death (“I regret that I have but one life to give to my country”), and Thomas Jefferson was a celebrated polymath in fields ranging from architecture to natural history. These stories brought alive the aspirations of the new country: honesty, loyalty, courage, and intelligence. Reputations are built on stories, not facts. Social psychology is replete with examples of how anecdotes trump data and facts. Stories endure and their meaning grows over time. A company reputation is built on stories that are told by them and about them: moments that make them special like Southwest’s famed singing and joke cracking flight attendants, how they deal with crisis like Johnson & Johnson’s iconic response to the Tylenol poisoning scare, and demonstrating what they believe and stand for as in Disney’s willingness to stand up for the LGBTQ+ community. Stories can also hurt if not addressed. For example, Jailhouse Coffee faced an internet attack some years ago by a group insisting the company name was insensitive to inmates. Fast action by the Jailhouse team showed this was not the case, and the attack was dropped. What are the stories that your clients tell about your platform and their experience of working with your freelancers? Make sure it’s the stories that represent the best of your platform.
3. Have you articulated your superpower?
A good story does more than define your platform, it tells current and potential clients and stakeholders what they can expect from working with your platform. For example, Khibraty is a well-respected and fast-growing freelance marketplace in the Middle East. Their stories, and their investments, focus on three key capabilities: performing as a trusted partner, ready access to top global and regional talent, and platform tech that makes it easy for their Middle East clients to work with the company. Velocity Global took a different approach, focusing their capability narrative on how they help enterprise clients stay legally compliant and avoid big fines, reducing client business risk, and facilitating employee and contingent staff mobility in a way that reinforces employee and freelancer productivity and engagement. Contra took yet another approach, emphasizing its investment in tools and services that enable their freelancers to successfully grow their own brand. Topcoder has focused its outbound communication on the company’s venerable reputation in open innovation. Do your stakeholders understand what superpower makes your platform special?
4. Is your reputation strategy as three-sided as your marketplace?
Torc offers a good example of reputation management. The company has established an explicit communications strategy for each side of its three-sided marketplace of software developers and data scientists: corporate clients, freelancers, and its partners and other stakeholders. So has Mash, a Melbourne based platform offering top tier creatives to its clients across Australia and SE Asia. Supportwave is a third excellent example. As a new entrant in the US, the platform has touted the high quality of its tech professionals to clients, while demonstrating a unique capability to serve the difficult and growing needs of the remote and hybrid enterprise workforce.
5. Who owns your reputation strategy? Does everyone know their role?
If the CEO doesn’t own the company’s reputation strategy, you don’t have a reputation strategy. And, if responsibility for the company’s reputation isn’t vested in each member of the organization, it’s likely not a very effective strategy. Three elements of strategy are crucial to a well-defined and broadly owned reputation plan: clarity of purpose, consistent data collection and analysis, and regular communication. Without a clear statement of the reputation a company aspires to, employees are left to improvise. Without data, a company is guessing how it is viewed, and almost certainly is guessing wrong. And in the absence of regular communication, it’s difficult to share and recognize progress and problems.
6. What will you do to stay in touch?
Following the “great recession” McKinsey published a thoughtful report on corporate reputations. Although a few years old, it’s still relevant. Here’s a helpful excerpt:
“Now more than ever, it will be action—not spin—that builds strong reputations. Organizations need to enhance their listening skills so that they are sufficiently aware of emerging issues; to reinvigorate their understanding of, and relationships with, critical stakeholders; and to go beyond traditional PR by activating a network of supporters who can influence key constituencies. Doing so effectively means stepping up both the sophistication and the internal coordination of reputation efforts. Some companies, for example, not only use cutting-edge attitudinal-segmentation techniques to better understand the concerns of stakeholders but also mobilize cross-functional teams to gather intelligence and respond quickly to far-flung reputational threats.”
Where do we go from here?
These are challenging times for the freelance revolution. Venture funding is down by half or more. Both SMB and expertise companies are vexed by an uncertain economy, and withholding budget for non-essential projects and initiatives. The global freelance community has meanwhile grown by 60% since 2020, upending supply and demand and creating a difficult situation for many newbie freelancers. More and more freelance platform teams and their funders are looking for the exit as a global recession continues to threaten. As Helge Lund, now chair of BP famously said, “The future has not been canceled.” But tough times call for the freelance community to double their efforts to defend, enhance, or reinforce their company reputations. As one pundit described it, the value of a company’s “good will” is large and growing: “Researchers have estimated the trust premium for ethical companies ranges from half of stock value to three-quarters of stock value. That may be a little high, but it is conservative to estimate that a company’s reputational value ranges from 20 to 30 percent.”
Viva la Revolution!
Read the full article here
