BUSINESS
NIKOLA LAZIĆ, DIRECTOR, NINAMEDIA RESEARCH
CORPORATE REPUTATION CANNOT BE
MEASURED BY GUESSES Corporate reputation is researched and established by serious multidisciplinary teams of scientists. As of recently, this service has started to be offered in Serbia by Ninamedia. Ninamedia Research is the only research agency in the region to have developed its own methodology for assessing corporate reputation, which it applies successfully. The final finding is expressed in the form of a rating in the Corporate Reputation Index (CRI) chapter in the development of the internet. As the Facebook founder explained, the company will invest at least 10 billion dollars in the new project. This will enable currently unimaginable experiences for users, who will be able to use virtual avatars to socialise and travel without limitation, but also without leaving their home. And who knows what else. Zuckerberg said that the name change was already being considered back in 2012 and 2014, when the
June 2017, as much as 77.5% of America’s adult population had a positive opinion of this social media platform, with only 15.11% expressing a negative view. However, four years later, in May 2021, the percentage of positive impressions had dropped to 52.69%, while the negative ones had leapt to 37.47%. If we consider that the company reported profits of 85.9 billion dollars last year (for the sake of comparison, Serbia’s entire GDP for the year was just 60.5
It only seems that there’s no direct link to the facts regarding the way a product or service is currently performing on the market. Ultimately, though, it is definitely connected to crucial parameters like revenue or profit
W
hen Facebook changed its name to Meta at the end of October 2021, founder Mark Zuckerberg very rationally explained that the purpose of this move was to create separate names for a large corporation and the world’s most popular social media platform, which has approximately 2.9 billion users. Speaking at the time, Zuckerberg added that the company had great ambitions in terms of developing the socalled Metaverse, which will represent a new
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Communications 2022
company acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, but that the final decision was made on the eve of the birth of the Metaverse. There’s no doubt that there were many good arguments, right? But there’s at least one ‘however’ in this story, behind which hides a series of challenges that led to a significant decline in Facebook’s reputation, primarily in the U.S. Less than a month after Zuckerberg announced the change, his former employee, Frances Haugen, testified before the Senate of the United States Congress about the way Facebook is endangering democracy and placing profit before the public good. She accused the company of fomenting hate speech and polarisation among users, because likes are more frequently given to extreme views than neutral ones. And likes lead to profits. Haugen stated at the time that the safety of users, particularly children, had been compromised. Facebook has been at the receiving end of various criticisms for years, and that has its price. In
billion dollars), then it is clear why Mark Zuckerberg opted to preserve his exorbitant income instead of the name which had, over the course of 17 years, been added to all world languages and become iconic. He distanced the company from the social media platform, which was accumulating ever more baggage. What did Mark Zuckerberg actually do? He definitely heeded the advice of good experts who deal with corporate reputation. Simply put, this somewhat obscure term pertains to the way a company is regarded by its stakeholders. And these are not just managers and (co)owners. The full picture comprises a company’s reputation among its employees, but also among its business partners, competitors, investors, banks and even clients (customers, service users), as well as the local or general community in which the company operates. It therefore only seems that there’s no direct link to the facts regarding the way a product or service is currently performing
