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Corporate Trust versus Social Media

The explosion of Social Media based technology has seriously complicated the tasks of managing reputational risk and maintaining corporate trust. Without an adequate Social Media coping strategy, the perceived integrity of an organisation can be seriously compromised, globally, within hours.

Picture credit: tanakawho

Nigel Cliffe started an interesting discussion on LinkedIn:

Trust used to be the currency of the corporate multinational but increasingly global corporations are mistrusted more than ever. What are emerging technologies doing to stem or accelerate that trend?

Social technologies in particular enable the public to share opinions and allow no hiding place for bad news to be quarantined. Is that going to increase or decrease trust in the global enterprise?

My response:

The social technologies generally amplify the sound of discordant voices, while the targets of critics rarely have adequate coping mechanisms for attenuation of the signal to noise ratio and managing the multiplicity of dialogues.

Consequently, following the principle of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, over-simplified to ‘complexity requires complexity to cope,’ the Corporates will continue to struggle with the chiming of the web voices; until they take a thoroughly strategic approach to managing the multilateral social media.

Managing reputational risk and maintaining corporate trust is a full-time job in the world of the social web.

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  • http://www.city.ac.uk/informationleadership/ David Chan

    The whole premise is that larger complex organisations can ‘control’ there public persona. This means they can push a message that is inconsistent with their actual actions.

    Where Ashby’s Law comes in is that larger organisations are more complex and therefore more difficult to control. The fact that social media and crowd sourcing type decision making makes it difficult for large corporates to ‘manage’ the message, is in my mind a GOOD THING. Let’s hope they try to BE GOOD rather than just LOOK GOOD!

  • Adrian Walmsley

    Interesting topic.
    Certainly social media have made it very difficult to suppress information.
    Take for example, the Baghdad blogger, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan
    during the 2009 Iranian elections, or closer to home the death of a bystander during the G20 summit in London.

    And most people would agree that this sort of information should be made public.

    However I am reminded of stories heard many years ago of people who would claim to have found (for example) a contaminant in a packet of food. Even if the claim were false, the food company would usually replace the (alleged) faulty item and provide additional goodies as a goodwill gesture because the truth is hard to establish in a case like this and they wanted to avoid adverse publicity.

    The point is that just as social media make it hard to suppress information, they make it easier to spread rumours and misinformation.

    How is the man in the street to assess whether a large organisation is in fact behaving unethically or whether it is just being painted black by a disgruntled ex-employee (for example)?

  • http://knowledgeshop.nextstagevolution.com/tools.cfm Joseph Carrabis

    (please excuse what may appear as a product push, it’s not meant to be)
    A worthy post and subject. We do lots of research into the psychocognitive and behavioral manifestations of trust in the online and offline world. This has led some partners/clients to ask us to design tools that help them learn when trust exists and when it does not. Three such tools requested by partners/clients are NextStage’s BlueSky Meter (determines if information is fabricated or real), Political Analyzer (determines if a politician can be trusted) and our Sentiment Analysis Tool (two elements specific to trust, “Trust” and “Affinity”, that together determine if the author trusts their audience and feels any relationship to that audience).
    Both in business and in other endeavors, loyalty is based on trust and confidence between individuals. Having an objective measurement (based on patented technologies) when you’re not sure can be a handy thing.