John Gilfeather knows more about corporate reputation than most, having spent a lifetime in the reputation research business, so when he says "I have never seen this level of vitriol aimed at larger corporations" it's time for corporate communicators to pay attention.

Gilfeather's latest survey of corporate reputation turns up the finding that most Americans now think most corporations are "idiots"--a catch-all term they use to describe a pattern of behavior that combines arrogance, greed and secrecy.

Meanwhile, another recent survey by economists at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University found that just 26 percent of Americans say they trust the American financial system, and 45 percent think the stock market will drop by 30 percent or more in the next 12 months.

When trust is so low, there are real consequences for financial companies, and the Chicago survey provides plenty of guidance about what needs to be done to restore confidence: 59 percent of respondents want stronger regulation of the financial sector.

And yet most companies continue to lobby intensely against stronger regulation. Most on Wall Street seem to consider the toothless regulatory package approved by Congress two weeks ago too much. One CEO complained of "an increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation" and lambasted an administration that is "reaching into every sector of American life" and "making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses."

A New York Times op-ed by investment banker and Clinton administration veteran Roger Altman makes the case that President Obama has a pretty good record when it comes to business (while arguing that the administration could do more).

But the reality is that most of the wounds that have caused American business to hemorrhage trust are entirely self-inflicted. And if smart CEOs want to heal those wounds, rather than pass the buck, they should be begging for even stricter government oversight.

At this point, it seems highly unlikely that Dow Chemical will ever step up and accept responsibility for the 1984 accident in Bhopal, India, that killed around 4,000 people and left many more with lifelong health problems and indelible memories of pain and suffering and horror.

The company--which acquired the assets of Union Carbide, but apparently none of its obligations, back in 2001--has resolutely refused to accept any legal responsibility for Bhopal. That it bears moral responsibility seems to me to be unarguable, and so perhaps the best we can hope for today is that every year around this time (yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the incident) activists and reporters and people on conscience around the world do whatever they can to make the leadership at Dow feel a little shame for the way they treated--and continue to treat--the victims of Bhopal.

So kudos to New York University journalism professor Suketu Mehta, whose International Herald Tribune op-ed I read over breakfast in Hong Kong this morning and who captures the essence of the story in one sentence: "What's missing in the whole sad story is any sense of a human connection between the faceless people who run the corporation and the victims." So busy have the people who run Dow Chemical been distancing themselves from this tragedy that it would presumably be emotionally devastating for them to see the victims are actual living, breathing human beings. That doesn't means we should stop trying.

Meanwhile, Dow continues to invest millions of dollars in promoting its corporate responsibility and sustainability efforts. But the company's true values are reflected in its actions, not its words. And at least for one day out of the year, it's good to be reminded of those actions--and of the company's continued inaction on this one defining issue.

Newsweek's Weston Kosova examines "greenwashing" in an article about the gap between how companies scored on its new Green Rankings list--which factors in environmental impact, policies and performance--and how they scored when it comes to green reputation, based on a survey of CEOs, CSR professionals, academics and environmental experts.

"Sometimes a good ad campaign does a better job of enhancing a company's green reputation than going through the expense and hassle of adopting actual environmentally sound practices," says Kosova, citing a Chevron ad campaign. "You might think that if Chevron was really worried about problems like global warming, they would spend some of those PR dollars lobbying Congress to adopt stricter gas mileage requirements for automobiles. They do not do this. Instead, I'm apparently supposed to praise them as environmental heroes because they tell me to unplug my toaster and think about getting a Prius.

"Yet ad campaigns like these work. Chevron lands at No. 371 out of 500 companies on Newsweek's green rankings. But it claims the No. 62 spot when it comes to green reputation thanks in part to those pretty, polished ads."

I'm not sure the ad campaign is "working." If a company's green reputation is significantly better than its green performance, I wouldn't call that a public relations success; I'd call it a public relations problem.

Particularly in the social media age, any gap between a company's advertising and marketing activity and its actual performance will almost certainly be exposed--probably sooner rather than later. And when it is, if people believe they have been misled, the damage to the company reputation, its credibility and its stakeholder relationships will be severe.

Companies whose reputation is better than the underlying reality would do well to rein in their communications.

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?

I am smarter than Jack Welch.*

Welch told the FT this week that "it was 'a dumb idea' for executives to focus so heavily on quarterly profits and share price gains," and that "the emphasis executives and investors had put on shareholder value--which began gaining popularity after a speech he made in 1981--was misplaced."

According to Welch: ""On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."

In other words, the stakeholder model of corporate management--rather than the relentless focus on keeping shareholders happy on a quarter-by-quarter basis--was right all along.

Needless to say, I'm not disagreeing with any of that. I am merely pointing out that I was saying all of this 10 years ago, five years ago and last year--all through the period when the "shareholder value" philosophy Welch and other CEOs were espousing and practicing at the time appeared to be working.

(The Welch interview is part of an excellent FT series on The Future of Capitalism.)

* Using a highly selective and issue-specific definition of the word "smarter."

Earlier thus year, I had the honor of being invited to the University of Southern California to present the annual Kenneth Owler Smith lecture, which took place last week. In the course of my remarks, I was pretty tough on the in-house communications role, making the point that if in-house PR people really had earned the "seat at the table" we all talk so much about, they would have been consulted when decisions--private jet travel, off-site entertainment--were being made that had such negative implications for corporate reputation.

Later, I was fortunate enough to find myself on a distinguished panel that also included Phyllis Piano--who as chief communications officer at Amgen has the good fortune to actually have to operate in an environment I only pontificate about. And Phyllis made the quite legitimate point that corporate communications people can't be present for every decision; that in reality thousands of decisions are made every day in corporations without the involvement of anyone with PR experience--and many of those decision do impact corporate reputation.

A few days later, I came across a perfect illustration of the point: an employee at a Little Rock McDonald's stepped in to save a female customer from an assault and was shot in the chest for his troubles; now the company is refusing to pay his medical bills "did not arise out of, or within the course and scope of his employment."

It's a dumb decision, and one I am almost certain was made without reference to the company's PR department.

But just because the PR department was not consulted doesn't mean the PR implications could not have been considered. I have long argued that the second most important responsibility of an in-house PR department--after counseling the CEO and the senior management team--is making sure that everyone within the organization understands the importance of reputation, and the importance of thinking about the reputational consequences of decisions as well as their financial, operational and legal implications.

Whoever made the decision to deny this claim clearly wasn't thinking about the headlines that would ensue--McDonald's "essentially told him to be a hero on his own time," says the ABC News report--or the community outrage they would generate (not to mention the message the decision sends to other McDonald's employees). They should have been.

We live in an era in which one dumb decision by a mid-level employee can almost overnight undo all the good reputation building work the PR department does. Those mid-level employees need to understand their obligation to help build the company's reputation as well as to help build its bottom line.

At the communal blog of European public relations firm Trimedia, Ilka Schwartz from the consultancy's German operations joins the growing list of PR experts commenting on the eerie silence of financial industry leaders in the current crisis.

"There is much coverage about them, but few of them venture forth and make themselves heard," she says. "Partly this is understandable. Would YOU want to give your views on how the market looks these days? Would you like to give detail s on your investment strategy, while your funds lose in value by the day?"

She then goes on to list all the questions people have about their financial security at a time like this. And that's the real point. Communications strategy at a time like this should be determined not by what you want to say but what your stakeholders want to hear.