Listen up, because this is important to your professional reputation and career.

Readers know I blog about the impacts of low trust on all kinds of human exchange and enterprise. Do you trust me as a credible expert? If you’re not so sure, what action would you take?

Did I hear the word “Google”?

Well, google me and you’ll get a bunch of corroborating evidence. I’m a seasoned chief marketing officer (CMO), I’ve contributed a chapter on trust to a marketing book and I speak about trust and reputation at conferences around the country. Unfortunately, a Google search on my name also serves up this result:

“A 25-year-old Goldsboro man — wanted by New York City police on two murder charges — was arrested Tuesday by Goldsboro police.”

That other Jarvis Cromwell – who apparently is a couple of decades my junior – shows up on page 7 of my Google search listings. If you ever thought he was me, your opinion would surely change. Which is why online reputation is so important, and that brings us to Stephanie Fierman.

Last week Stephanie Fierman, a well known and respected marketing executive, spoke at a CMO Club dinner in New York and shared some thinking on managing online reputation. You can find coverage on this topic by Anna Maria Virzi in ClickZ here. You can also read Stephanie’s blog, here.

Stephanie got everyone’s attention by discussing how widespread gossip, innuendo and misinformation about executives are on the internet. And it is easy for executives to wake up one morning and find themselves the victim of misinformation or worse. And the more senior and visible you are in an organization, the more vulnerable you are to potentially damaging disinformation campaigns. The scary part of the story is that everyone from recruiters, to new hires to clients can and do check you out on the web.

So start taking action now. Here are a few of the tips Stephanie shared the other night:

1. Monitor your online footprint. Many people rarely if ever check out their search listings. That’s a mistake. Make sure you check your online presence regularly on all of the search engines. You should also monitor online news services, newsletters, blogs, chatrooms and image banks.

2. Build your online reputation before you need it. If you haven’t already done so, you need to begin creating search-engine friendly content before a crisis arises. Blog, post to other blogs, create a website, create online profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) be active at work and in other activities that will get you mentioned online.

3. Respond quickly to damaging, inaccurate or slanted online content. If you find yourself attacked or worse online, don’t hide. You need to respond quickly and authoritatively in the realm where the original content appeared, with clear and open messages and factual information. Tell the truth.

4. Be discriminating. If you participate in social networks, be very discriminating about whom you connect and what content you post!

5. Appeal to the webmaster. Ask the webmaster to remove questionable or defamatory content. Frequently they will.

In some ways, Google is bringing us back to a Victorian age when social circles were smaller and gossip could spread throughout a community like wildfire. There was little or no anonymity in those circumstances and ladies and gentleman had to vigorously defend their reputations because ruination was a real possibility.

The takeaway for trustmeisters: today’s professionals live in a google-centric world where rumor and innuendo can be used against them. All the more reason to manage your personal reputation proactively and with care.

In the wake of well-publicized poisonings from pet food, toothpaste and drugs, China is now widely believed to have a food safety problem.

And the “Brand China” trust problem threatens their place in the global supply chain. Do you find yourself checking the country-of-origin labels in the fruit and vegetable section at Costco? In the same vein, one wonders how long it will take for pet food brands to begin touting “all-American made” ingredients.

What’s happening in China highlights a key principal applied by the Trustmeisters here in the Reputation Garage: Trust problems are at their heart organizational performance issues. To mitigate the risk of a serious trust event, you must put reputation into a performance management framework – managing it with the same rigor applied to other performance issues, such as quality and cost control.

And, yes, China is taking action. Step one in their trust recovery program: Show that you are serious about the corruption that led to the problems, in this case by sentencing to death the head of your food and drug oversight organization. To maintain decorum, we’ll give no comment on this one, but we could! Step two: Increase public protection by setting up a national food recall system. Step three: Communicate concern and your willingness to work and dialogue with interested parties across the global community.

China’s fix is of course reactionary – these are moves taken to dampen an escalating crisis of confidence amongst both producers who source in China and their downstream consumers. It will take months and years before the effectiveness of any changes is known.

The more important question for would-be brand Trustmeisters is this: How confident are you in your ability to police the behavior of your overseas suppliers? If the answer is “not very,” then be prepared for some potentially nasty consequences.

Just look at the impacts of the recent crisis on the U.S. pet food industry:

1) A costly recall.

2) Announced programs (expensive ones presumably) by some companies to test all of their ingredients.

3) Widespread bad publicity that has not only damaged brand trust, but also alerted consumers to the fact that many pet food brands are really just re-marketers of the same globally-sourced ingredient mix. This will likely send more pet food brands into the off-price commodity bins at places like Wal-Mart.

4) According to today’s Wall Street Journal, weaker companies may not survive this crisis, and we should expect to see further consolidation in the pet food industry as stronger players capable of imposing more rigorous quality control gobble up the also-rans.

A word to the wise: China’s recent problems will not be the only road bumps over the course of what many economists are calling China’s century. Which is why we never tire of saying it: Hope is not a strategy. If you haven’t put the issues of trust and reputation into a performance management framework, what are you waiting for?

The funny, short video below says a lot about the state of relations today between marketers and customers. It’s a break-up scene. Ms. Consumer wants a divorce from Mr. Advertiser. And just like the dissolution of many relationships, trust has broken down.

Some of “Ms. Consumer’s” grievances:

“You’re saying you love me, but you’re not behaving like you love me. You’re not genuine.”

“You do all the talking…. It’s not exactly a dialogue.”

The video exposes a fundamental issue for companies looking to build trusted customer relationships: We now live in a “show me” marketplace where our words are increasingly disbelieved.

Piper Jaffray’s recent analyst report on the new advertising ecosystem (The User Revolution) highlights some of the problems plaguing advertisers.

• The effectiveness of one-way advertising messaging has been collapsing around the world. Its influence on customers is more and more suspect.

• Content is increasingly controlled by users, who are either designing their own or mixing information sources to their preference.

• The consumer decision process is changing radically. In the new age of information transparency, products and services are selected based on expert reviews or peer recommendation, not because of the marketing or sales message.

And if you’re a business-to-business marketer and think you’re immune from all this, think again. A recent study sought to identify the trusted sources of information among sophisticated corporate technology buyers. Only 3% picked the vendor itself as the most trusted source of information. Analysts took top billing.

So what’s the fix for marketers? Better spruce up your influence-building skills on all levels.

Do agencies get it? Many think not. We can report, however, that this clip was passed along to the Garage from the folks at Allen & Gerritsen. So at least one agency gets it.

A few of us attended the CRO Conference in New York this week. This new organization dedicated to best practices in corporate responsibility already has 15% of the Fortune 500 signed up and it’s growing fast.

The meeting offered plenty of performance take-aways that organizations of every stripe can learn from. Here are a few that we’re chewing on back here in the Garage:

1) Some of the smartest companies are driving their sustainability practices from the outside in, with the customer firmly in sight. (Peter Drucker would have been proud.) Mattel, for example, is not only implementing a more sustainable packaging strategy for “Barbie”, they have eased a big customer frustration: having to cut, pry, twist and pull Barbie out of her well-bolted, plastic shrine. See a fun CNBC clip on Mattel’s strategy here.

2) Not one, but two Fortune 500 CEOs advised that when addressing sustainability issues an important starting point is to deal with the facts — both the convenient and the inconvenient. Then focus on continuous improvement, not instant perfection. Funny how if you strip away the hype and just “get after it”, profits and greater good can come of it.

3) OK, full disclosure, this was a green crowd, but there was thoughtful consensus that it’s a myth that green practices are the enemy of profit. On the most basic level, what company wouldn’t want to reduce costs through less fuel, less water? And did we mention that Mattel’s stock price has been on a tear over the past year?

4) Long-term solutions to many sustainability issues are not going to yield short-term gains. That’s a problem, and a big topic. And it relates to what we refer to here in the Garage as The Math Problem. More on that another day.

5) Climate change will be profoundly important in accelerating both business growth and new wealth. Of course for some, the grim reaper of economics, “creative destruction,” will be in play. What companies are headed for a rough patch? The panel of experts – all consultants trying hard not to offend – demurred. Oh, wait a minute. The word “Detroit” slipped out. And it was predicted that water-intensive agriculture is going to die faster than anybody currently expects.

As fellow Trustmeister Paul Allen has just gotten back from the Galapagos Islands, we can’t help but paraphrase the famous Darwin insight here: “It’s not the strongest that survive, but those that are best able to adapt.” You can read his dispatch shortly.

Finally, one of the biggest points for trustmeisters that came out of the conference: If you don’t know what it is you need to do to have your reputation aligned with your publics, you’re courting real trouble.

Enjoy the weekend.

There is a lot of lip service being paid to the environment by marketers of all stripes. Is it authentic? A ‘greening of business’ cover story in Advertising Age (here) suggests the answer may be no in some cases.

For marketers, the more important question is whether or not donning “green lipstick” will ultimately pay off down the road.

Not if you’re not real about it.

According to Ad Age, while companies are flocking to add green to their marketing platforms, their true environmental conscience is being questioned. Hmm. The issue of consumer distrust that haunts marketers at every turn seems to be in play here. The learning for would-be trustmeisters: It takes a lot more than clever advertising to convince consumers that you’re serious about embarking down the road of sustainability.

Examples of companies who are doing more than wearing the green lipstick include Intel and GE. Both are developing sustainable programs. Will such emphasis pay off for them? GE says it will grow revenues that provide some kind of environmental benefit to $20 billion by 2010.

GE is being more authentic than most, but it still has its critics. Our take here is that as companies engage more actively in issues of societal responsibility, they also must beef up communications programs – with particular emphasis on dialoguing with stakeholders and critics alike.

We expect to see continuing debate in executive suites on what to do about this issue, particularly because in our view the payoff potential can be significant. Considering that $179 billion was invested in socially responsible mutual funds in 2005, moving beyond mere conscience touting seems not only sensible, but profitable.

Fellow trustmeister Jarvis Cromwell points out in a previous post (here), that the LOHAS consumer segment is a growing and highly desirable market. New industries will emerge, and reputations and empires will be built, as we see the greening of corporate America.

And need we say that future generations are depending on it?

Less lip service please. True brand trustmeisters will do more by re-engaging with nature, science and the bottom line in an authentic way.

Our advice: Don’t move forward on green efforts until you’re ready to be real. That means first aligning causes with business operations and stakeholder communities, and then backing your actions up with strong communications.

by JARVIS CROMWELL

We find Andrew Zolli one of the more interesting and relevant futurists out there these days. He recently wrote a great piece in Fast Company (here) that kicked off with a quote from renown free-marketeer Milton Friedman:

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business”, Friedman wrote back in 1970, and that is to “engage in activities designed to increase profits.”

As soon as we read this quote here in the Garage, we knew that Zolli had nailed it: Friedman’s pronouncement marked a watershed moment for global business, a tipping point for the guiding principal of the era: profitable self-interest would prove to be the only reliable endgame.

Everyone knows the good parts that played out with the help of Friedman’s compass. The rise of the activist shareholder movement. Reagan-era deregulation. Michael Douglas’ declaration that “Greed is Good” in the movie Wall Street. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The creation of the Jack Welch rules of management.

All of this and more helped companies achieve higher performance throughout the 80s and 90s. “Mr. Market” surged, helped along by a long-term decline in interest rates and a speculative bubble or two. A lot of executives (and shareholders) grew rich.

Greed took a victory lap. Capitalistic self-interest flourished. Customers got better and cheaper products. All in, Friedman’s playbook worked. But… Continue Reading