Reputation micromanagement

MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland first came to my attention a few years ago in a Technology Review interview in which he discussed “reality mining”, which at that point comprised online data mining enhanced with mobile phone data. As Pentland told the magazine, your phone

knows where you are, and this is obviously sort of useful. But the generalization is that maybe it can know lots of things about you. Take your Facebook friends as an example. The phone could know which ones you socialize with in person, which ones are your work friends, and which friends you’ve never seen in your life. That’s an interesting distinction, and reality mining can make it automatic. It’s about making the “dumb” information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life.

The IT might be dumb, but the application was far from it: one nine-month study of 94 subjects delivered data that allowed researchers to “accurately predict 95 per cent of reciprocated friendships in the study”.

Now Pentland is back, having hung up the phone and equipped his subjects with technology to measure their offline, “social signals”, such as tone of voice, gesticulation, and proximity to others. As Lesley Gaines-Ross discusses, some people are measurably more “charismatic” than others – and, according to the unsurprising findings of Pentland’s team, these individuals tend to be more successful.

Reputation management relies on the measurement of reputation, which has become more granular in the last few years. Where once reputation programmes focused on the impact of communications initiatives and crises, the mainstream channels through which these issues reached a wider public, and the relationship of that wider public with particular stakeholders, the emergence of social media has clearly created interest in measuring smaller interactions and understanding their contribution to reputation.

Pentland’s latest research not only offers the prospect of measurement at another, completely unmediated level. For reputation managers, it may also deliver on the promise of social media.  While interactions on Twitter, Facebook, et al, are shaped by the platforms on which they occur, unmediated reality mining could truly connect personal behaviour with organisational reputation.