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First there was Glassdoor, now there's Reputation Check. Glassdoor, which I've blogged about before, allows employees the rate their CEOs, but Vanno's Reputation Check lets everyone—employees, customers, vendors—weigh in on 5,800 companies around the world.
The result is a reputation "score" based on the social network's ability to compile and measure a combination of personal experiences, news stories, and opinions about other opinions regarding a specific firm.
Vanno is based in San Francisco, co-founded by a physicist who takes all the information and uses what's called the Bayesian Algorithm to come up with a reputation score. The algorithm is apparently used for a variety of purposes, including filtering out spam. The physicist got the idea to use it for measuring corporate reputations after his success with Bayesian metrics in predicting Colorado avalanches (or so they tell me...).
It's not clear how many users have actually weighed in since the site went Beta last October. Some results are potential head scratchers. For example, Microsoft [MSFT
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]has a much better reputation than Apple [AAPL
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]. One reason is that Apple has one of the worst "green" reputations, ranking #3940 out of #5800, despite commercials promoting the long life of its new laptop batteries, meaning fewer batteries in landfills.
Today Vanno announced new rankings of firms based on social responsibility and customer satisfaction. The top five socially responsible companies are: Peugeot, Akzo Nobel, NEC, HSBC, and DuPont.
DuPont? Really?
As for HSBC, Vanno says despite problems in the financial sector, "our users thinks pretty highly of this UK based bank."
The company with the best reputation for customer service is Unilever (UN), followed by Cisco, Costco, Patagonia, and Google.
So which companies have the worst reputations using this algorithm? In social responsibility, the worst rep went to Carnival, followed by Nintendo, Syngenta, Halliburton and Compass Group.
But there were some shockers. Even though the list of worst companies for customer service is topped by United's UAL (no surprise), it's followed by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., an interesting choice. But look at the next three: Tesla Motors, Nieman Marcus, and Cartier. Those three, by this standard, have a worse reputation than the Peanut company charged with the salmonella outbreak (#6 on the list,) Bank of America (#7), Chrysler (#8) and bankrupt Circuit City!
"Tesla is a much-touted Silicon Valley startup which aims to produce an electric car," says Vanno in a statement. "We've been watching their reputation drop, while that of the much maligned GM rises slowly." The company says its Reputation Index suggests "despite GM's deep troubles and PR bloopers, people worry about putting their faith in a startup that is having trouble delivering a few cars to wealthy buyers." Ouch.
UPDATE/Correction: An earlier posting of this article had inadvertently listed Carter's instead of Cartier. We regret this editing error.
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