The Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 Index highlights the 100 most capitalised companies publically listed on the London Stock Exchange. These companies are widely considered to be the most influential and are revered across the business world. However, success in business does not always equate to success in the mind of the public.
Achievement in the public sphere is difficult to quantify. While revenue, profit and volume of employees are all solid and commonly accepted measures of business performance, these figures do not correlate directly with success in the public’s eye.
Companies should be aware of how the public perceive them in social media: conversations online can go viral and tarnish a company’s reputation over the long term. Large corporates’ reputations can be quickly impacted if they have no effective social media strategy in place to protect them.
While traditional market research can be used to gain a degree of insight into the public consciousness, it is time consuming and never perfectly representative. Social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 allow for the collection of data in real time, enabling analysis of large volumes of relevant public conversations.
