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Google, AT& T and Starbucks Top Vanno Rankings for Community Involvement

Comm Involv 2-8-10

Community Involvement includes charitable giving, support for the arts and education, volunteering and country or region of origin.  You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.

5 reasons why Toyota will be OK

Toyota overall and cust sat

1)  Toyota has a huge reservoir of consumer good will. The company regularly tops rankings – including ours – not only of automakers, but of the largest multi-nationals.   At Vanno, Toyota was the overall top overall company for a good fraction of 2009.  The recent acceleration and brake issues have obviously taken a toll – particularly relative to customer satisfaction, as the graphic shows – but the company is still in the overall top 10. The fact is that company reputations take time to build, and they are hard to destroy overnight or with one event.

2) Toyota’s reputation is strong across the board. Historically, Toyota ranks highly not only relative to customer satisfaction, but also community involvement, the environment and social responsibility.  Their weakest aspect of reputation – employee satisfaction – still is in the top 30 among the 250 companies we track.

Toyota Individual

3) Consumers respond well when companies say they are sorry and fix things quickly.   One of the most remarkable recent studies in consumer behavior involved doctors and patients, and the power of saying “I’m sorry”.   When doctors admitted errors and offered to quickly correct and/or compensate patients, the number of lawsuits filed by patients dropped considerably.    Similarly, when companies respond quickly and forcefully to negative events – like Kellogg did when some of its brands of peanut-butter crackers were found to be contaminated with salmonella – the negative impact on company reputation is short-lived.    If Toyota corrects the problems quickly and makes the appropriate public apologies, there is every reason to believe that consumers will respond favorably in the long term.

4) People buy cars via comparison shopping, and Toyota still compares very well to all other manufacturers. it is important to remember that sudden acceleration has been around for a long time, and has been primarily associated with  Chrysler and Ford before Toyota. More broadly viewed, consumers have relatively long memories and Toyota reliability has become the stuff of consumer lore.    As long as their products are priced competitively, and – as noted above – consumers believe a good-faith effort was made to correct the issues, it’s unlikely this one event will destroy a long and hard-earned reputation.

5) Most cases of sudden acceleration will turn out to be driver-related. When all is said and done, this is primarily an operator error issue.  There will likely be very few injuries or accidents that unambiguously involve actual mechanical/electrical failure.     The statistical reality is that many more people will die from reading, texting or tweeting about Toyota while driving around this week than ever will from any acceleration system flaws.

The big potential problem for Toyota is that every case of a driver unwittingly stepping on the gas at an inopportune time will now turn into a lawsuit.   It’s a well known phenomenon -  give something a name and widespread publicity – and associate it with deep-pocketed companies  – and complaints (and lawsuits) will come out of the woodwork.     Recall, for example, the long, convoluted and ongoing battle over vaccines and  autism.   When the (now thoroughly debunked) vaccine connection was made public, entirely new claims of autism started showing up everywhere, straining the very definition of the disease.   And, of course, lawsuits proliferated against every company in the vaccine food-chain.

For more on how Toyota treats its customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, visit Vanno.

Unilever, Costco and Wal-Mart Top Vanno Rankings for Customer Satisfaction

Vanno Cust Sat Rankings 2-3-10

You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.

Is Google’s don’t-be-evil stance “a load of crap”?

Google Scores 2-1-10

It’s been reported that during an informal chat with Apple employees, Steve Jobs described Google’s don’t-be-evil mantra as “bullshit” or ” a load of crap”.    While the tech press seems predictably focused on the distinction between the two characterizations, we asked ourselves whether Jobs in fact had a point.

A quick look at Google’s reputation scores on Vanno shows that social responsibility – which by our measure includes avoidance of controversial business, human rights and good governance among other factors – is in fact a weak point in the otherwise stellar reputation of the search and advertising giant.  Issues surrounding privacy (Streetview, health records), copyright (digital book projects), censorship (China until recently) and questionable business practices (behavioral advertising) have all been the subject of extensive online discussion.

By the way, for all Google’s flaws when it comes to social responsibility, Apple is the wrong company to throw the first stone.   They score lower than Google on this count.

Apple Social Responsibility

Some of Apple’s social responsibility issues are similar to those that Google faces, such as censorship (Dalai Lama and the iPhone) and questionable business practices (DRM).   Other concerns have included manufacturing practices (silicon sweatshops) and corporate governance (refusal to report on sustainability efforts, lack of disclosure surrounding the health of CEO Steve Jobs and options back-dating).

You can learn more about how Google and Apple treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.

Welcome back to Vanno!

nick-1Vanno is live again.   We’re still the same Company Reputation Index that we always were, but the way we go about building our rankings has changed significantly.   We think the changes have resulted in a more powerful set of business tools for our subscribers.   So if you’re interested in how companies treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, sign up for a free trial.

For those of you who were familiar with our free site, here’s what happened between then and now.   The free site relied on “crowdsourcing” to generate the raw material – stories, votes and comments – for our analysis.    While we count many serious and thoughtful people among the thousands of users of our free site, we discovered two things that led us to question the viability of a crowdsourced model for company reputations. Continue reading ‘Welcome back to Vanno!’

Vanno is changing!

Identity Commerce LLC is re-launching Vanno as a subscription-only service.  The new site is scheduled to open on February 1, 2010.   The existing free site is no longer accessible.  All user personal information from the free site has been permanently deleted in accordance with our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

We thank you for your continued interest in Vanno.  We invite you to visit the new site after February 1, 2010 and sign up for a free trial subscription.   We believe you will find it more compelling and professionally valuable than ever before.  If you have any questions, please contact us at question@vanno.com.

We apologize for the delay in launching the new site, but we’ve been a bit distracted by the addition of a new member to the Vanno family.    Shaila David Clark was born on January 17, 2010.  She immediately moved to the top of our rankings.

IMG_1908_1

Sincerely,

Nick, Landon and the Vanno Team

Twitter: A leading or lagging indicator of business trends?

latitude_e6400_firehose

nick-11One would assume there is some sort of predictive power in Twitter’s firehose, given that Google, Microsoft and a bunch of stealth startups seem willing to pay for special access to the data stream.    But my take, based on Twitter traffic and trends as they stand today, is that insights gleaned from Twitter actually LAG more conventional online media.    Here’s why. Continue reading ‘Twitter: A leading or lagging indicator of business trends?’

Can AOL save journalism?

Yeah, AOL.  The company best known for littering the planet with signup disks.   Or, if you’re a student of the fast and loose business practices of Web 1.0, the company whose revenue shenanigans helped land a number of startup execs in the big house (remember homestore.com?).  I know it sounds crazy, but read on.

Continue reading ‘Can AOL save journalism?’

Big companies can be just as innovative as startups

I’m getting really tired of pundits claiming that big companies can’t innovate, and that startups are the saviors of our economic future.    I’ve worked in/with big companies and startups, and have seen tons of innovation and many brilliant people in both. The biggest difference is a simple and obvious one – big companies become conservative because they have something to conserve, and startups take big risks because they have nothing to lose. Their respective shareholders expect these behaviors, and this difference in operating model – not lack of innovation or smart people in big companies – explains the difference in outcomes. Otherwise said, big companies don’t bet the farm, simply because they have a lot more mouths to feed than startups do. 

The latest article of this genre that set me off was in Silicon Valley Insider.   Henry Blodget pimps a video of Kevin Ryan talking about “Why big rich companies can’t crush tiny startups“.   I posted a long comment that focused primarily on the fundamental logical flaw in the kind of reasoning Ryan (and many others) use, and thought I’d share it here also. 

Continue reading ‘Big companies can be just as innovative as startups’

The broken guitar had no effect on United Airlines

Social media marketers (all 100 million of them, if my Twitter count is correct) are bending over backward to congratulate themselves on the effect the 4M YouTube views of a song about a broken guitar had on United Airlines.   Some social media PR types are touting the enormous brand damage done by the incident, and a journalist at the UK Times Online has even connected a 10% drop in United’s stock price with the spread of the YouTube video.

This reminds me of a similar case of social media overreach in which Vanno was directly involved.  Remember the now infamous Michael Phelps bong incident?   Not long after Lou Dobbs highlighted how Kellogg’s Vanno rank (a social media measure of  company reputation) dropped precipitously after the bong incident, someone connected a drop in Kellogg’s stock price with the social media buzz/outrage around Kellogg’s decision to drop Phelps. Continue reading ‘The broken guitar had no effect on United Airlines’