Company & Leadership
Strategic communications for the greater good.
Reputation Matters advises clients and helps them contribute to a greater good using visible and action-oriented communications.
Do you want to be recognized for the great work you already do? Improve how you engage customers, employees, investors, and other groups? Activate “social warriors” who help society achieve greater equity for everyone? We partner with you to deliver communications that build and safeguard trust with your key stakeholders.
At its core, Reputation Matters is a strategic communications consultancy. We develop programs that help you build relationships with customers, prospects, employees, investors, and other important people.
We accomplish this by filtering everything we do through five values that form the bedrock of reputation management:
- Trust
- Empathy
- Equity
- Authenticity
- Fearlessness
Your strategic communications partner.
Paul Thomas
Principal
A corporate communicator and a gentleman (usually), Paul learned his craft from an über-professional whose mantra was “no hyperbole.” That says volumes because she taught him when spin and its practitioners were prized.
A veteran of multinational corporations and global public relations agencies, Paul’s expert knowledge of trusted strategic communications is broad, ranging from:
- Thought leadership and strategic business communications to transformational change communications and employee engagement;
- Public relations and brand messaging to crisis communications and reputation management;
- Product marketing communications and sales campaigns to customer experience strategy and client on-boarding, including highly automated mass communications for core business operations.
His hands-on experience runs front-to-back in complex organizations, spanning customers, users, and clients (buyers); front-line sales, implementation specialists, and support teams. He also re-engineered communications for call centers and similar business operations; automated print and electronic correspondence; and navigation, labels, and content for digital platforms.
As a people manager, Paul has built highly effective communications teams through hiring, coaching, (re)training, and reorganizing people and functions globally.
Before founding Reputation Matters LLC, Paul led Business Communications for Thomson Reuters, managing a global team of external, industry, and internal communications professionals. He spent 16 years in various corporate and marketing communications capacities for UBS’s wealth management business. He worked in account management at Hill & Knowlton and Edelman, two venerable agencies known for providing expert public relations counsel.
He worked in financial services before, during, and after numerous scandals — the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the dot-bomb era, the global research settlement, and the Great Recession. As a result, Paul understands now more than ever why reputation matters.
ORIGIN STORY
A history of Reputation Matters.
Established 2012: Reinvented: 2020
Conceived in 2012, Reputation Matters was created to record my reflections and observations and serve as an online portfolio of my professional work. Mainstream media reigned supreme, while bloggers staked claims and began finding their voices in social media’s new, still-to-be-defined category.
The original Reputation Matters site was an experiment, my attempt as a very formal corporate communicator to let my hair down. I wanted to understand an evolving channel, blogs, and how they intersected with social media’s three reigning stars, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I also hoped to showcase my work to the world and prospective employers.
Eschewing a more fixed, corporate design, the original Reputation Matters website resembled a then-fashionable “Tumblog.” It combined elements of traditional websites with Tumblr’s endless scroll of posts and multimedia content that is pervasive today. That was perhaps the first and last time I was on the bleeding edge of an emerging trend!
It’s hard to determine whether my experiment floundered or foundered. It’s probably fairer to say that I, as the site’s founder, floundered, leading Reputation Matters itself to eventually founder. By 2014, my already sporadic posts dwindled. Like so many internet relics, the website recorded a creative idea and promising start, followed by a slow, painful (near) death.
It’s hard to determine whether my experiment floundered or foundered. It’s probably fairer to say that I, as the site’s founder, floundered, leading Reputation Matters itself to eventually founder.”
Fast forward to 2020, a year like no other. One defined by a “coron-apocalypse”; tarnished traditional media and fragmented “sources of truth” reporting rampant misinformation; a period of unprecedented isolation and collective anxiety. One that unwittingly made social media and electronic communications substitutes for physical contact and emotional support.
The result: People are starving for normalcy and peace of mind, making effective communications and credible, trusted sources of information more important than ever. Said another way, “the more things change.”
Many of yesteryear’s musings on Reputation Matters, references to “corporate ‘cred,” and other too-clever-by-half word plays are no longer hip. Some might say they’re long overdue for a more-hip replacement! Yet, much of what I observed in 2012 about brands and reputations still rings true today.
“Authenticity and consistency are essential for brands nowadays, whether global or local, enterprise or entrepreneurial, consumer or personal. Customers, business partners, employees, prospective employers, investors, and other stakeholders have more access to information than ever. And they are living more of their lives online. It will become increasingly difficult to segment and target messages to niche audiences as that happens. “
Now resurrected, Reputation Matters returns as a comprehensive resource for strategic communications. It can show you how to use your voice and actions to advance a greater good while building your reputation and safeguarding your brand.
It’s for that reason that I revived this site. And it is for that reason that reputation matters, now more than ever.
Paul Thomas
Founder
Reputation Matters LLC
Why reputation matters.
To quote Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, I may not be able to define obscenity, “but I know it when I see it.” Yet, despite several succinct definitions by Merriam-Webster, Oxford Languages, and others, the same could be said about “reputation.”
“She’s great.”
“He has a reputation.”
If those were descriptions of you, which would you prefer? Me? I want to be her. And that’s why reputation matters.
When it comes to reputation, you want people to use an adjective to describe it. Left unmodified, simply having “a reputation” is pejorative.
Our reputations develop and change over time. Often, they precede us, whether through a personal referral, a deliberate Internet search, or by sheer luck, so your first impression may be out of your control. Other times, they’re shaped by the feelings you leave. As a result, protecting your reputation presumes a certain degree of self-awareness, whether you are an individual or an organization, corporation, or another entity whose reputation you’re managing.
With that in mind, who are you (or who is your organization), really? How do you want to be known? What words would you like family, friends, customers, competitors, or colleagues to use to describe you? These are the questions to ask and things to consider as you define your brand and your desired reputation.
Reputations are complex and evolve with you. They distinguish you as an individual. They are what make you you. And, they can be built, shaped, and protected when you understand what they are and define them to a stricter standard than Justice Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity.
It’s for that reason that I created this site. And it’s for that reason that reputation matters.
Paul Thomas
Founder
Reputation Matters LLC
First published in 2012 on now defunct http://reputationmatters.me.