Making Reputation Measurable (and Defensible)

Drew: Hello, renegade marketers. If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you're a regular listener, welcome back.

Before I present today's episode, I wanted to give a shout-out to one of our flocking awesome sponsors, 1mind. 1mind CEO Amanda Kahlow will be delivering the keynote at the Strategy Lab in each city. Her topic: the future of SDRs and why the traditional SDR model is already obsolete for many B2B companies. If you've been wrestling with SDR productivity, AI-assisted prospecting, or the question "Do you even need SDRs anymore?" this will be the most productive 15 minutes of your quarter. For more details on our Strategy Labs, please check out cmohuddles.com or follow the link in the description.

You're about to listen to an Expert Huddle where experts share their insights into the topics of critical importance to our flocking awesome community, CMO Huddles. In this episode, Taran Nandha of Growth Natives joins us to unveil the RepuTracker, a brand reputation tool built for members of the CMO Huddles Leader Program. Born from a challenge we kept hearing—that brand is hard to measure and even harder to defend—the tool tracks your brand reputation across multiple dimensions and benchmarks you against your competitors. It's a practical way to connect brand efforts to business impact and finally have the data to back it up. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to a very special bonus huddle in which we unveil RepuTracker, a brand reputation tracker developed for members of the CMO Huddles Leader Program. RepuTracker was born out of a clear need that we kept hearing over and over again: "We can't afford to have brand tracking, so we can't use the word 'brand' because we can't show the business value of it." And so this issue of tracking brand and the value of brand just came up over and over again in Huddles over the last five years. So without a reputation tracking tool, it's really impossible to gauge how your strategic shifts are impacting things. Like, take if you start spending more on analyst relationships—would you know? Would you be able to show the value there other than the clippings that you got or ratings that you got? What happens if you cut your PR budget? And that should show up, and I know from others that it does. If you cut your budget and suddenly have no PR, you can have less exposure online, and that is business impact. And just as importantly, let's say you have a layoff of employees. How does that impact brand perception? So to answer this and solve a major problem for a lot of our community, we built a tool just for you, and it's called RepuTracker. We're saying it's in beta because we're still tweaking some of the things, but it tracks your monthly reputation across multiple dimensions, and we'll go through all those dimensions. It also lets you compare your score to one competitor or two competitors. We put in one competitor for every member of the Leader Program, and then you also get to compare your score against like 200-plus other brands. I mean, it's kind of amazing. So over the next few minutes, our co-developer from Growth Natives, our partner who's helped us with so many different things, is here to sort of help understand what's behind these numbers and also answer your questions. So we're going to first do a demo, and then we're going to take your questions. Both—if you want to come on camera and ask, if you want us to look at your brand together right here—we can do that. So with that, Taran, great to see you. So where are we catching you today?

Taran: Oh, I am actually in India right now, so sitting at home in my home office.

Drew: There you go. Well, and I know it's early there. Yeah, 10:30, right? It's early morning. Like how about at night? Well, anyway, we really appreciate you being here with us at 10:30 at night and all the work that you and your team did to help bring RepuTracker to life. You know, it literally started as a piece of paper.

Taran: A back-of-the-envelope discussion at last year's Dreamforce or like one of the conferences. And, you know, we kind of literally sketched out, you know, how do we in this day and age—because, you know, one thing is very clear: with the advent of AI, with everything that's changing, brand is becoming, you know, exceedingly important. So, you know, for a while it used to be like, you know, content is king. I think brand is king, and brand is going to be king for a very long time. It always was. And then the other thing is reputation, because that's also very tightly linked to your brand. So, you know, I'm glad that we built it, and I'm very excited to showcase it to everybody.

Drew: Well, it's funny because I literally this week, in a conversation with a CMO, the CMO said, "I can't use the word 'brand' because the CFO just rolls their eyes." And so we purposely called this tool—we call it Reputation, RepuTracker—and we use the word "reputation" on the website. But between us Huddlers, it's brand, and we've encouraged CMOs over the last year or two to use the word "reputation" because we all kind of understand that notion that, you know, if you have a good reputation, someone wants to do business with you. If you have a bad reputation, they don't. And so that's why we've focused on that word. But, you know, again, among us chickens.

Taran: And it's also not just like, you know, one bad review on Google should not mean—all of G2 Crowd should not mean that your brand is—and that's what we have seen also a lot of times. You know, the executive team gets rattled by, "Hey, you know, somebody gave us a really bad review on Google or like on G2 Crowd." But you have to look at it in totality. And I think, you know, what we will showcase, hopefully the Huddle as well, will appreciate the fact that, you know, we've tried to look pretty deep into it and think deep into it before we built it.

Drew: And let's spend a couple minutes on that. I mean, technically—I mean, it's funny. I don't know if we need to talk too much about how the sausage is made, but I do think we'll get into that. Were there some technical challenges to pull all this data together that are—that we can share? Because, again, this isn't something that took a day or two. This took several months of development work. Just in case any of you are thinking of trying to do this on your own, there are some challenges here, right?

Taran: Absolutely. So there are, you know, challenges at two levels. One is really like, you know, the conceptual challenges. Like, you know, what is reputation? What is brand? How do you measure it? And there are so many great online signals today. So it's not just like, you know, Google, it's not just G2 Crowd, it's not just—there are like, you know, dozens of—and as you know, we've kind of built the system to pull information from all of them. And then each system behaves differently. So the APIs for Google are different, the ones for Facebook are different, the ones for G2 are different. Some of them are more transparent in sharing information, and some of them are not. The other challenge was like, you know, how do we bring parity across everyone? So, you know, we had to obviously use publicly available sources. But things like, you know, SimilarWeb, for example—you know, if we use SimilarWeb to look at the traffic trends and the share of the traffic and everything else, it gives us directionally correct information. One was really like, you know, what should be the sources? And really kind of conceptualizing how much weight, age, and everything we should be doing, and what is the algorithm. How do we calculate it? And then obviously the technical challenges were: how many of these systems are open to sharing information? And each one of them, you know, we have to build the connectors to pull data from the APIs. And then obviously the algorithm and the kind of magic behind it.

Drew: I will just sort of weigh in here conceptually. When we started to think about this at CMO Huddles, we did sort of think about this multidimensional tool that looked at sort of various aspects of it. This is the kind of thing that AI was quite helpful in, both figuring out those dimensions and helping us sort of name them and resolve some of it. But what it didn't have is—where AI didn't help us is exactly which API we could use that would be able to deliver this idea and that we could plug into the system technically. So there's a lot of—when you create a project like this, you have a vision and you have a lot of wishes. And what was great about working with you all is you took the vision and then you made it a reality. And so with that, I think it's worth just jumping in and showing the tool, right?

Taran: Let’s get into that. I can see Katie is really wanting to see it. 

Drew: All right, so here we go. All right, so this isn't the landing page. You've already signed in, okay? So we'll just say you've signed in and talk a little bit about what's going on here, Taran, in this sort of higher level up here.

Taran: Yeah, so, you know, on the left corner you see the overall brand score. So that's like, you know, the aggregated cumulative score the algorithm is giving. In this case, it is Webflow. So Webflow is like, you know, the company that we are logged in as. Obviously, each one of you will have your own login. And as you come in, this will—as soon as you log in, this will be the first page that you will see. The second box that you see, just right of the overall brand score, is the benchmark. What we are doing here is we've benchmarked against everybody else, the average score across all the CMO Huddle members—basically companies. So in this case, 81 is the score for Webflow, which is an amazingly good score. The average among all CMO Huddle member companies is 52, so that tells you like where you stand in your, you know, kind of cohort or whatever you want to call that. But that's kind of the high level. And then we do have the ability, which we'll show just in a minute, how to benchmark against your true relevant competitors as well. I think the other important factor is that we are actually storing data month over month so that you are able to create a trend over time and see how your brand is being built or areas where you need to work on, and also how the brand is shifting over time.

Drew: And then one of the features that I love is, so you can look at it—this is graphic, and obviously you see the graph in this case is moving up. But you also provide the breakdown right here, and what's important in this—and again, as you're looking at this tool, I want to make sure that you're not over—"Oh my God, we went up seven points" or "We went down seven points." This is over time will become more valuable. The fact that we have three months of data here for Webflow is great, but I would not make any decisions based on that. But in part of the thing that we're looking at now, you can help us with it. So let's look at this right here. So the big change for Webflow is their brand perception improved in November by four points, right? And that's a pretty big jump. And I happen to know that Webflow has gotten a lot of press because of all the AI work that they've been doing. And if we look at just that particular one with brand perception, for example, and just so you know, these are the individual scores for each of those, but you can look at the insights. And where's this data coming from? Google Reviews, Trustpilot, G2, Capterra, and Clutch. So like they're doing really well, and so they obviously had some more positive reviews that came in. So if you look at this data and you say, "Huh, it doesn't match up with your reality," we want to hear about it, absolutely, because that's really important. And with some of the other CMOs I've been talking to about as we bring up their scores, sometimes if they see a dip, for example, in brand awareness—and brand awareness is made up of news mentions and website traffic, that's SimilarWeb and Google Trends, right?—they would know if their website traffic is down because they have that data. And so we want to know, again, that there's a correlation there. But why don't you walk us through—so each of these things—I started doing, should we go through like power of voice and what that means?

Taran: Yeah. So, you know, power of voice basically—I mean, it is really kind of based on—so all of these are based on anywhere between two to six different inputs. And then obviously there is a, you know, formula behind each one of these. So be it the power of voice, the brand awareness, digital engagement, brand perception, employee sentiment—all of them. So brand—you know, the awareness, the power of voice is based on Google Trends and SimilarWeb. The brand awareness component of it is based on Google Trends, Google News, and SimilarWeb—you know, what we are seeing on SimilarWeb in terms of the traffic, the sources, how it is. And similarly, the brand perception, as Drew was showing, brand perception from Google Reviews, G2, Capterra, Clutch, and Trustpilot.

Drew: So, and let's stop there for a second on that one, because SaaS brands or brands that have more users and they're likely to get reviews are going to score stronger than, say, a professional services company like, you know, KPMG, may or may not have reviews like that. And so the absolute score—trying to compare yourself to Webflow if you're a services company—is not necessarily a fool's errand, and so it's discounted a little bit. You just have to recognize that this tool is going to treat your categories somewhat differently. And, you know, we may be able to down the road and in, you know, in the roadmap, make some adjustments for that based on your category. But right now, brands like Webflow are going to have an advantage in the score. So what you really care about is your brand and your direct competitor's brand. Do not be obsessed with either the CMO averages or some of these other companies that score really, really well. It just happens that they are doing really well on the things that we're measuring that may not be measuring you in some circumstances. However, like power of voice, this is pretty true for everybody, right? Website traffic and Google Trends—that's pretty relevant. Yep. So that's power of voice, and I want to make sure we go through it. So brand awareness is, again, news mentions, website traffic, and Google Trends. So again, those are things that all brands should have some control over and impact on digital engagement

Taran: It's also like, you know, the quality of the mentions as well. Like it's looking at whether it is negative, whether it is positive mentions. What kind of news are you generating, basically.

Drew: And that's where, when we talk about Google Trends, the mentions and so forth, right there, that's where that comes in too. So, and again, that's a little bit of the secret sauce of this tool, right? Is that you're doing some sorting behind the scenes of this. With digital engagement, you know, some of you may say, "Well, you know, Instagram isn't that important to us," and we've discounted the value of that for most B2B brands. But again, we have a weighted average here. YouTube is important to almost all B2B brands today, and LinkedIn is certainly important to all B2B brands. X is as well. So, and you know, yeah, for better or for worse, X still matters, and it really matters if you're in the AI space. You know, whatever your personal belief on it, and mine is not that positive about it, your brand is being mentioned, most likely, on Twitter, whether you want it to be or not, right? And then so we talked about digital engagement. Let's just talk about brand perception. Okay, we already covered those things. Let's talk about employee sentiment in the source data of this: Glassdoor, Google Reviews, Trustpilot, G2, again, Capterra, and Clutch. Where, right?

Taran: But I think one of the things I would like to highlight here is, though you might think that these are similar to some of the other—you know, we're using similar sources—in this case, obviously, you know, Glassdoor is—but we are giving more weight to Glassdoor in this than the others because Glassdoor is the most relevant one here. And then the second most relevant would probably be Google Reviews, because a lot of times you do get reviews from your employees on Google as well. It's not linear in terms of, you know, how the weightages are given. So in this case, Glassdoor has the highest weight because that's the most relevant.

Drew: And just because this is a real-time tool, I want to just—let's see if this—let me try something here.

Taran: Interesting test we did.

Drew: Right. So this is fascinating. This is Cisco. And just, you know, as one—employee sentiment here, there was a big drop from September to October, and they had a bounce back. But this also was the month that they announced layoffs, so that was a moment in time where, okay, this data is looking pretty good in terms of potentially reading what's going on out there from a validation standpoint. Now let's go to the comparison page, right? Okay, what's going on here?

Taran: Yeah, so the comparison tab is, you know, available, and you can benchmark yourself against, you know, three different competitors at a time. So obviously, in this case, we've got Cisco, Wix, Adobe, I think. We have to change—

Drew: Oh, right, right, right. Sorry about that. Let's see if I can—I'll just put Webflow back in here. Yes, exactly that. Yep.

Taran: We can ignore Cisco because that would not be relevant, right? You know, you have Webflow, Adobe, and Wix. And, you know, as marketers, we know kind of what these companies do. So the power of voice, you can see they're pretty much similar to each other, very little difference. Brand awareness, obviously, like again, Adobe's been there for a very, very long time and still carries a lot of weight. Webflow is kind of the newer kid on the block, but does have a very decent brand awareness because it has made a good name for itself. Digital engagement, again, we don't see a whole lot of difference because they all are probably pushing hard. They all are probably getting, you know, to the relevant folks. They're getting the likes and shares on all the digital platforms. But, you know, when you come to brand perception, then it becomes really interesting. You know, Webflow has been making a lot of noise around AI. They've actually been doing a lot of good things, and they are not just perceived—they are actually kind of the new generation technology. And they get a lot of—Adobe, we all know, has lost its sheen over the last few years. The last couple of years have been really rough for them. They've also, you know, been doing layoffs. There have been like, you know, other challenges. So brand perception and employee sentiment, you can see, like for the other two, Adobe and Wix, it is not that strong. Oh yeah, while Webflow is kind of on fire there. So, and that's why, you know, Webflow is ranking at 80, and Adobe and Wix are stuck at 66. So when we first looked at it, we were like, "Does it make sense?" But when we kind of thought through it and looked at some of the information, it actually made a lot of sense.

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Taran: I think we have a question from JD.

Drew: I don't know how to answer that. We'll get back to you on that, JD, but I do know that we can just pull up your brand. So here's Tygo. And I know we have a competitor for Tygo in the system, but I don't remember off the top of my head, what is it? SolarEdge. Thank you. So we, and by the way, just so you know, we pulled one competitor out of, and most of the time, we made the decision on behalf of the members of the Leader program. If we got it wrong, and there's a competitor that you wish we'd track, and we can, I think we've already shared with you who the competitor is. But if we look at this, we see that, you know, SolarEdge is doing better in some areas, but you're kind of aligned. You know, where they're doing better is brand awareness and power of voice. And my guess is, JD, that you would be able to explain those things, and that those would be rational, right? That that would have met your expectations, and that's really important to us, because you know, if it's showing you something that doesn't make any sense, then you know, obviously the meters are wrong. But so far, when we've done this, these have been directionally accurate.

JD: But more, more important to me would be you could click on those areas where we are deficient, right, and I could generate actions to address the deficiency. Correct. And that's the power of this tool, because it ought to give clear recommendations for me. And it does right there. There it is. It tells me these are three ideas. And I can look at them and say, these two make sense. This one's a little off, but these two. And then I can go execute and then see if it works.

Drew: And again, it's rare that you're going to be able to do something where, gee, that effort that you did shows up that month. But if it's a focused effort, and you really get into it, and you publish a lot of thought leadership, and you're getting it picked up, for example, you should see that in the next one month, two months, three months. And that's now, obviously these things should also correlate to successful client growth and everything like this. But what is good is you at least have a sense as a result of this data that your efforts are having an impact in the marketplace. It may not be that you see an increase in a score and suddenly your pipeline is fuller, right?

Taran: I would like to mention here, Drew, is that, you know, all the recommendations, they're AI-powered. So we've built AI into the tool as well. So even when we are doing the analysis, there is AI involved, and then the recommendations that we are presenting, they would evolve over time based on the machine learning. And as more data comes in, there's actually going to be a self-learning system.

Drew: In terms of the questions that have been asked so far and we really encourage you to put as many questions as you can. That's the whole purpose of this meeting, in addition to sort of going deeper into it. The data is updated every month. Charles asked that question. Every month, so at the beginning of the month. So we just, we, meaning the Growth Natives team, just put in the data for November, and it takes two or three days to populate, verify and double-check everything, so there aren't any aberrations. And so by, you know, by the fifth of every month, you will be safe, unless that happens to fall on a weekend or something, to assume that the data will be updated.

Charles: So that means that the report that I have that says November, was it refreshed today, like first week of December, or will I get another report that will be labeled December that is refreshed, but really is looking backwards?

Drew: So the November stuff that you've got is populated in early December. The December data will be populated in early January. So it's basically rolling. It's a one-month period of time, right?

Charles: So every month, you know, it's refreshed in the first week of the following month, but it's a backward look, 30 days. You know, blended. Makes sense.

Drew: So the next, the other question that you asked. So, and I'm interested in this, so, Taran, when you're looking and pulling data, for example, from YouTube, and you have a brand that you're pulling for, in the case of Charles, is it Insightful.io, which is it? Is it .ai?

Charles: Currently it's .io, currently it's .io, right? So, and that's the YouTube issue. Taran, just so, you know, in my case, apparently, and I didn't even know this until a few weeks ago, that there have been four or five, like, different profiles created on some of these platforms, on YouTube, but we have three different pages, not all of which are officially under our control. One is on the old brand. Two are on the new brand. It gets very fuzzy, so I was just curious if there's a way for us to audit in the sort of back end of the tool, what profiles are actually factored in versus out? Because that might be something, in my case, that's screwing up the results.

Taran: Absolutely. And we can do that. We can tell you, and if there are any exclusions, we can do that as well. But you know, we'd obviously need your involvement. This is just beta, you know, at some point down the road, we might make it, you know, where you're actually able to connect other systems as well, and as we evolve this. So, you know, one of the other things Drew and I have been talking about is, what if, because when we were talking about this earlier, the technical challenges and how we pull data. One of the thoughts was, we'd ask people to plug in their Google Analytics into it, which we can build. But then the challenge is, if your competitor is not on RepuTracker, then the benchmarking would be off. So you know, everything has a bit of a grain of salt, as you can say, for most purposes, if we have configured it right, and if it is pulling data from the right sources, even if they are publicly available sources, directionally, it should be correct.

Drew: And I think that's really important is, again, this is not the same as going into your bank account and looking how much money is in there. That is a fact-based thing. This is a directional-based thing. And so, I, for one, think having Google Analytics in there for your own data would be great, because then you know that aspect of it is going to be accurate, or more accurate than SimilarWeb, and I would live with the understanding that the competitor data will not be based on that, and you just have to sort of decide how you're going to manage that. It will no longer be apples to apples.

Taran: And we could even give you a toggle where when you're looking at your data, you're looking through a Google Analytics lens, but when you're doing the competitor benchmarking, then everything is coming from SimilarWeb.

Drew: And I love how Taran just says this, knowing, of course, his team behind him is going, "Thanks, Taran. Yeah, good luck with that one. You're going to program that for us." But anyway, yeah, I wanted to address Bindu's question from the beginning, and so I'm just going to share the screen again. So your question was about the brand awareness one, and so I just pulled up Fleetcor. And so brand awareness is pulling from news mentions, website traffic and Google Trends. And then, as Taran mentioned earlier, it's not just brand mentions and news mentions, we have some sentiment scoring as well, right? And again, the secret sauce behind this thing is that we're weighting. It's not just one-third, one-third, one-third. We have a formula for weighting these things, and again, that formula is consistent across not just your brand and your competitor's brand, but the whole universe of brands. So on one hand, you know, it's nice, we've got over, what, 200 brands in here. So you could look at Canva, and you say, "Oh, they're doing pretty well above average." You know, again, you might be looking at a different category. And so it's nice to have all this data in here. Sendbird, new brand. We just added them, but they're, you know, they're off to a fine start. So if you change companies and you're a member of the Leader program, we will add you, but it's not retroactive, just so, you know, it's just the way it is. And again, our intent is that this will be free to members of the Leader Program and continue to be free. And then we're working with the folks at Growth Natives to turn this into a paid product that folks can get.

Taran: Outside of CMO Huddles, we will probably try and monetize it as well.

Drew: So let's see. So who else here? Who else? I'm just looking at the folks, Leslie. Let's see if we, let's look at WEI for a second. So boom. We get this out of the way. It looks like the score went down. And so the big decline is in brand awareness, and that's a huge decline there. Taran, yep. And so I wonder what would have happened that could drive something like that down so fast.

Taran: I think my initial gut answer would be there's probably a drop, and this is where, when we are depending on something like SimilarWeb, it could be a risky thing, because it could be because SimilarWeb has not given us, you know, is not directionally correct at that point. Basically, okay, that's what we think. This would be something that we should certainly look deeper into and see why the 10-point drop. Because that's not normal.

Drew: No, it's not, but it's consistent between October and November. So it feels like it's either... And again, we're sharing here, folks, that this is in beta, and there's, you know, it's one of two things, either there is a problem with awareness and there was a dip, or there's something going on in how we're gathering the data. And so we're looking to you, if you see something like this, it's like, "Wait, what happened here?" to sort of give us that feedback so we can go and look to see so that this just gets better and more accurate. And again, this is why we're saying, don't share this yet with your CEO.

Taran: And the other thing we are seeing, you know, wherever there is Google Trends involved, you know, a lot of companies are losing traffic today. You know, because people are not searching on Google anymore, they are looking at the LLMs for answers. So like, when we look at our customer base, on average, there's a dip of 15 to 20% in traffic to their websites, not because, you know, and it seems universal, because a lot more people are actually, especially in the B2B world, and more sophisticated audiences, if you have more sophisticated audiences, they're actually going to the LLMs, they're going to ChatGPT, Perplexity, you know, the Geminis to get the answers rather than searching on search engines. So, like, some of those things could be impacting, and if we have to adjust the algorithms, we will.

Drew: And I think that's an important point. It definitely could do this. So let's give folks... We talked a little bit about Google Analytics as possibly being able to plug that in and toggle it on and off to sort of get your more accurate scores, because we know that would impact a couple of the scores. Are there some other things that you can imagine this tool evolving and adding or changing over time?

Taran: So the other one would be, you know, call it AEO, geo trends basically as well. Because, you know, everybody's interested in knowing how the LLMs are, you know, perceiving them. How many times, you know? So that's going to be like another component that we are thinking of building into it, like, how referenceable are you by the LLMs, and how many times are they referencing your brand when people are searching for relevant information?

Drew: Not to get folks too excited about that, but that would be amazing, because it is an issue that everybody would love to have. And obviously people are paying a lot of money to Ahrefs and other tools for that information in a lot of different ways.

JD: If you can figure that out, I'll buy stock in your company.

Drew:  Yeah, there you go. But there are, JD, there are tools out there. SEMrush has developed something, and there are another 100 companies that are doing this as a service.

Taran: It's changing so fast to JD's point, it's changing so fast that it's also very hard to... And what we have seen, JD, is like working with different customers that it's actually, you know, fascinating how the AI engines' adoption and also their rankings for companies, like, if you put in a focused effort for a month or two, you actually start showing up really quickly. So actually, it's kind of easy to move the needle, at least in terms of visibility and being referenceable by these LLMs.

JD: My view is the numbers are nice, but just like the NPS in a vacuum, what is 70 versus 60? And does it really matter? Not really. What matters is the actions and acting and doing something that makes the company better. So it was your actions that sold it for me, the recommendations.

Taran: Exactly, and how you, you know, track over time, because that's, you know, like, if you have a tough customer base, you know, you're in an industry where it's very hard to please people, 75 NPS may be very acceptable versus if you are in some place where, like, 95 is the benchmark that you want to achieve.

JD: When you showed me yours, Drew, when I saw mine, it dawned on me I hadn't done thought leadership in a while. And I was like, "That's right, I've fallen off the wagon. Hadn't done thought leadership in a while. I need to get on that." And that's what this is for. It's good.

Drew: Amazing. And so I want to wrap things up a little bit here. But again, if anybody remaining has questions for us, please throw them in chat. So I want to sort of first of all, just rain praise on Growth Natives for taking a concept and turning it into reality, which is amazing, and I'm so excited, and seeing three months' worth of data in this is validating the value of this to our community. I also want to say, one of the things that we try to do with CMO Huddles is sort of lead by example. And this, to me, falls into a bucket that we used to call marketing as a service. Or what are the value-add things that you can deliver to your customers that will help them in some way or another? And the real inspiration from this came from a PE firm that delivered something like this to its PE companies. And I thought, well, we, CMO Huddles, need to be thinking about, what can we deliver to our constituents? And if, as you look at a tool like this, and you say, "Gee, what could I do for our customers that would be equal, that would have this kind of profound value and solve a major problem?" And the chances are you're going to want to build it, and you're going to need a company like Growth Natives to do it, because these things are not necessarily easy to build. They're easy to conceive. From conception to reality, there's some time involved. The value of something like this accrues over time. I mean, imagine now, JD, you get back to thought leadership six months from now? We now have nine months of data, and you could say, "Oh, my God, look, that's where we did a heavy thought leadership thing or not," right? But you'll know, did it have an impact or not, and you'll have some correlation and perhaps causation, right? And I think that's where it gets really, really exciting, because in an ideal world, you would be able to take the actions that are recommended or others and have an impact, and these things will have an overall impact and show up as a result of the efforts that you're doing in marketing. So anyway, enough preaching from up high. Taran again, thank you for you and your team.

Taran: The pleasure is all ours, Drew. And you know, love doing these projects because they keep us on our toes as well, you know, and going into the rat holes of how do we decipher reputation and brand? It was really interesting over the last few months. And thanks to you for your guidance. And by the way, you know, Drew was giving us a lot of credit, but obviously it was his idea, and then he has actually been working very closely with the team, making sure that, you know, because understanding what's important for the brands, and how do you measure the brands, that's, you know, Drew's expertise, so we've leaned a lot on him to guide the team in building the system that actually is usable and relevant for everyone. It's not perfect, but our goal is to keep working on it and keep making it better so that we can actually really add a lot of value and validation for all the marketers that are working hard day in and day out. 

Drew: Awesome. All right. Well, Taran, thank you for your partnership and insights. Thanks to you for joining us again. RepuTracker is in beta. It means it will get smarter and more useful with your feedback. So please check on it every month. Let us know if you see aberrations. Please give us feedback. That's one thing we probably should do in the tool, is add a feedback bar so that they can, in real time, point out aberrations or make an adjustment.

Taran: Yeah, that and any enhancements that you can think of. We may not have thought of everything, right, you know? So if there are things that you think are relevant to each of these areas and also, like, if they need to be put on a roadmap, we can think about it. We don't want to do, like, a lot of customizations, but we are absolutely open to ideas where, if it is something that can be used by everyone, or at least a large part of the community, we would certainly build it into the product.

Drew: If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!