Beyond Safeguarding Reputation

Following up on a post in which she linked to Weber Shandwick's 99 Tips for Safeguarding Reputation, Leslie Gaines-Ross analyzes those tips and concludes that "it appears to me that the mainstays of lasting reputation are transparency, ethics, leadership, culture and responsibility."

I think I'd add one more, which is authenticity. I suppose you could make a case that it's covered by a combination of culture and ethics, but I think that in the social media age it deserves greater focus. Companies--and those who speak on their behalf, from the top down--need to demonstrate a consistent understanding of and commitment to a core set of values that really are part of the institutional DNA.

I'd also throw out a question for Leslie and for others interested in this subject: safeguarding reputation is only half of the equation, because reputation is not, after all, an end in itself; it is useful only in so far as it helps organizations achieve their objectives. Can we come up with 99 tips for leveraging reputation?