In some of my early posts, I likened Digital Disrupters to Vikings, in terms of being fast moving, launching asymmetrical market attacks and continuously changing their angle of attack to pursue value, whilst using light weight tools, agility and simple instrumentation to facilitate this.
Latterly, I have been stressing reputation, which was important to vikings too. In fact some people would say that a Viking's name and reputation were more important to him (or her) than gold and land. As they wanted their reputations to last for ever and reputation was a strong means for recruiting a band of warriors for the next viking voyage or raid.
In the digital world, reputation is important to digital enterprises, becasue customer loyalty is much more volatile than with traditional businesses and a whole new set of organisations are embracing Customer Care (CC) as well as Customer Experience (CX) in what could be termed C2X. I touch on this in my book ( The Way of DAU ). If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then loss of reputation destroys company value for lunch. A strong digital brand should have a positive and engaging reputation based on positive values.
A recent story about Cloudflare in Wired, is a salutary lesson about reputation and proactive reputation management. For those of you who don't know about Cloudflare, it provides a cloud service for intermediating and absorbing DDoS attacks. It does this by sitting between a cloud service and its users and sampling traffic to detect patterns associated with DDoS attacks and filtering out any DDoS transactions against the service.
The founder & CEO, Mathew Prince, takes a strong stand on Freedom of Speech so is happy to provide services to some organisations which many may find distasteful. Interestingly enough early experience with escort services in Turkey showed that learning to protect a service which many people attack, actually improved the overall capability of the DDoS service to defend against similar attacks against more innocent targets.
Cloudflare relied on simply stating its position and liberal principles which are enshrined in the American Constitution. Unfortunately this was not enough and providing services one particular Neo Nazi organisation began to lead to a snow ball of assaults on Cloudflare's reputation, until the CEO felt compelled to take action and modify their stance on what protecting free speech actually meant for the company, leading to the banning of this particular customer.
This goes to show that reputations have to be actively managed and part of this is continuing review of an organisation's ethical stance as well as actual customer experience is essential; something which might be termed Ethics Sustainability, Customer Care and Experience (ESC2X), with the accronym pronounced Essex, redefining the old joke about someone with a lisping estuary accent saying that "Ethics isn't a place East of London".
At the same time, many other people and organisations are beginning to question what free speech should mean on the web. To my mind, with freedom comes responsibility, as I define freedom as the right to make your own decisions and mistakes, and not to have them imposed upon you. This is a two way deal. In the Cloudflare example, the Neo Nazi organisation appears to have gone beyond free speech to threaten and bully people, as well as slander the leadership of Cloudflare by implying that they were sympathisers to their ideology. So they broke the free speech contract and deserved to be kicked off Cloudflare's service. Cloudflare probably needed to encourage more debate about their stance and code, as part of their overall leadership practices.
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