Remember that old Paul Simon song that goes something like:  …”When numbers get serious, you see their shape everywhere… “   We couldn’t find a better explanation anywhere of what Vanno is about.    Recall, for example, the online chatter about Kellogg, peanut butter, bongs and Pop-Tarts on the Web and in the blogosphere?   But it took numbers - ranks dropping from 9 to 16 to 32… – on a graph to crystallize what was going on in the minds of consumers and the media.    That now famous graph got a lot of heat for it’s cartoon-like form, but it’s substance was clear and effective.

Well, we’ve been working on our graphics skills, collecting and processing stories, votes and comments from our community and are now ready to make all our trending data available to the general public.   We call it Vanno Company Intelligence.    It includes amazing features like real-time reputation trend graphs for each of the 6000+ companies in our database, with interactive links to all the underlying stories, the ability to see the different aspects of reputation contribute to overall reputation and a tool to compare trends for multiple companies.   Check out the details here.

We’re offering Vanno Company Intelligence on a subscription basis.   The cost?    Well, if you are an active Elite Influencer in the Vanno community, you’ve already earned your subscription.   After all, without our community, we’d have no scores, no ranks and no trends.    But if you don’t have the time or inclination to participate in the community, we’re offering the service on a “pay what you think it’s worth” basis.     Seriously.    It’s not a gimmick, but an approach that’s based on an economic theory called “participative pricing” that is being used in online music (think Radiohead), restaurants and theaters.    And we think it’s particularly applicable in our case, partly because we’re new kids on the block, and partly because the value of insights gleaned from social news and social media is clearly different for different people.    So we’ll watch and learn, and in the meantime you can be sure you’re getting your money’s worth, because you’re setting the price.

And to be very clear - registered users will continue to have free access to the entire Company Reputation Index, best and worst company reputation lists, membership in the Vanno community, the ability to follow specific companies and users, ReputationCheck widgets and email alerts.

So we invite you to have a look.  Let us know what you like and don’t like, and what we can do better.