Broadcast and national media coverage still lead the way in building reputations – even in the age of social media.
MHP recently supported the Media Momentum Awards, hosted in Barcelona by GP Bullhound, a leading international investment banking firm. As part of this I was given access to senior influencers in the fifty, fastest growth digital media companies recognised by the awards. I was interested in how these leaders in the sector used and regarded social media as a tool to manage reputations.
As my white paper “Reputation Management in the era of social media” shows social media is now, to quote one of the participants, “[no longer a]choice, but rather a given – a hygiene factor.” However, although significant percentages agreed that most social media platforms were important, and likely to become more important channels of communication, they also cautioned about the credibility of information found through them.
For example, whilst over 50% felt that Facebook was relevant to their business communications a similar percentage also agreed that information found on Facebook could not be judged to be credible – seven per cent felt that it was not credible at all.
When it came to generating reputation traditional media won hands down.
Broadcast coverage was felt to have huge or significant impact by virtually all our respondents - 93%, whilst coverage on influential blogs was seen as hugely significant by 23% and significant by 50% - beating the impact of trade coverage, but lagging behind national newspapers. Perhaps surprisingly, considering the recent controversies over its role, Twitter fared even worse with the majority reporting that it had little or no influence.
Given that the people we spoke to were all entrepreneurs in the digital space we believe that they can be seen as good exemplars of current practice - and their insights make interesting reading. There are a number of pointers towards best practice as well as some ‘blindspots’ from which even they seem to suffer. The Reputation Management in the era of social media report can be downloaded by following the link.
