Vanno Launches Company Reputation Index
When you think about it, a corporation's reputation, like an individual's, is extremely vulnerable. There are so many variables at play -- earnings reports, stock price variations, product lines, brands, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, community involvement, product liability lawsuits, regulatory battles, global investments, and many more -- that it is no wonder the corporate sector spends billions on reputation management campaigns year after year.
Today is the public launch of an intriguing new web-based service, Vanno, that has built a social evaluation platform where communities of users can collectively and quantitatively build an authoritative index of corporation reputations.
"We'd like to create civil dialogue between all the stakeholders -- consumers, shareholders, employees, executives, regulators, investors journalists, activists, analysts -- anyone who just has a personal story about the company in question," Vanno Co-Founder Nick DiGiacomo explained to me in an interview yesterday.
Vanno, which has been in private beta since August, is one of those rare websites that launch with an impressively robust technological platform already in place and ready to scale. Users can add stories -- either from the web or personal experiences of their own -- that other Vanno users can either agree or disagree with. Over time, these stories are aggregated to build a corporate score (on a zero-100 scale) in several key categories.
Over the past few days, I looked at some companies in the news. General Motors, for example, which faces the greatest survival challenge in its history, scores extremely low in customer and employee satisfaction (42 and 39 respectively). But, GM also receives extremely high marks in social responsibility (94), community involvement (89), and in its environmental reputation (86).
These no doubt reflect the entrenched value of the company's long-term investments in the communities where its suppliers, dealers, and customers are concentrated. Another logical inference might be that while GM is going through a crisis, it has a lot of residual support out there -- perhaps enough to help land, say, a massive bailout from Congress?
This isn't the first startup for DiGiacomo and his partners. But, it's their first that does not rely on venture capital. They're funding it themselves. "We've been through this enough times that we didn't want the pressures that VC exert," DiGiacomo told me. "Don't get me wrong. I have VC friends and I love these guys to death. But this company is a passion for us. So we have a profound ambivalence dealing with them."
A few things that visitors will notice poking around Vanno's interface is that is extremely user-friendly and intuitive. You can browse all the content without signing up, including the 5,425 company profiles and the 1,000 user profiles. (You have to register to add stories or vote, but registration is free.) The only monetization for now is via Google AdSense.
Eventually, however, if they can build a large, active community of users, Vanno will be able to deliver specialized segments of users that should draw handsome multiples from sponsors and advertisers, which quite logically would include many Fortune 500 firms. The upside for this venture, imho, is considerable.
Plus, because they are self-funded, DiGiacomo says he is actually having a lot more fun than at his previous start-ups. "The best part of having no venture capitalists involved? We haven't had to prepare a single power point presentation!"