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.
Archive
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.
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.
Vanno 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!’
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.
Sincerely,
Nick, Landon and the Vanno Team
One 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?’
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.
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’
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’
As someone who has hired literally dozens of MBAs from first tier schools over the years, I was puzzled by the buzz around the Harvard Business School MBA ethics oath. It was always my impression that a moral compass came as a standard feature on a base model MBA. Now, it seems, it’s being offered as an optional upgrade.
But given its availability, going forward no one would hire an MBA who hadn’t taken the oath, right? I don’t think so. My last experience with MBAs under extreme temptation leads me to conclude that such an oath would actually do more harm than good because it trivializes the issue of business ethics. Here’s why. Continue reading ‘The MBA oath trivializes business ethics’
Meet my friends.
Our screen names make us sound like a gang of comic book figures, a League of Cyber Superheroes in a virtual Hall of Justice — names like FlyFisherGirl, mulgi, doranka, pinkuff, shaunsayers, kjripp, joflynn, VicinSea, Cheesehead. Together we are the Vanno Elite Influencers, and actually, cyber superheroes is not too far off the mark.
What we have in common as do-gooders is the power to change the world, one opinion at a time. Each time we post a story, share a bit of news, make a comment or even just vote about something going on in the commercial world, we can alter public opinion.
We’re sort of like a modern-day version of the Nielsen family, but instead of representing the way the world rates TV, we represent the way the world of consumers looks at businesses. And let’s face it, businesses bank on their public image — enough so to do the right thing, if it means it will boost their reputation.
VicinSea, for example, uses her superpower to fight for the environment. She battled Monsanto, leader of the GMO empire, for their proposal to use Agent Orange, and Chevron for their phony news reports about the disaster in Ecuador. She also praised the green efforts of a soap company that reuses bottles, and Dell Computers for not exporting its hardware waste.
Our savvy consumer, FlyFisherGirl, forewarned friends about wrongful finance charges by Chase, or the way executives are laying off workers in small waves to avoid the bad press caused by massive firings. She also spread the good news about WalMart worker bonuses and Fedex giving away free résumés, and let us know where to get a good cheap girdle and some free shoes.
Doranka’s bio says he is interested in how business can make the world a better place, and he is doing just that at Vanno, by encouraging better business practices like supermarkets extending labor contracts during this tough economy. Mulgi is keeping it green with stories like Disney planting trees or the decline of plastic bags.
StevenLowell works in the media industry, doing voice-overs, and adds his voice to the debates on Vanno. He has an insider’s perspective on commercials like the BK spots featuring square butts and Mexican wrestlers. Pinkuff shares his e-expertise with submissions and tech talk about IBM, Kindle/Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Kjripp is keeping it real with stories like the DQ “sweet deals” that aren’t, or the killing of true stories and the writing of fake reviews. Joflynn is not afraid to stand up to Big Brother, and let the markets do their thing : “As long as it’s not a government regulation, I’m all for it” he wrote of commercial nutritional standards, and echoed in comments about prescription drugs, clean energy legislation and bailout bucks.
There are others in our ranks: skunkworks416, robbob, mattbennett, RoyC, dlhm, worlfram, push123, markw1, jkj, phils, GBS, Steven, glee, christhm, jcolman, tomh, jon, denny, descon, annette, truckeetrapper, and each of us contributes our own special perspective and influences the rest of the network in our own unique way.
We are, literally, trendsetters — Vanno uses our voices and our votes to create the Vanno Company Intelligence, a trending tool that charts the way consumers perceive corporations. The longer we use Vanno, and the louder we get, the better businesses will become as they have the opportunity to listen in. Little by little, we can make a difference.
You don’t have to be a superhero to change the world. But it helps.
