Trade press coverage.

Conventional wisdom suggests that a company builds its reputation by first achieving visibility in the computer trade press. To test that theory, we scanned the November 1993 Computer Select CD-ROM database, a compendium of 74,261 articles and abstracts from 170 industry publications. When we tallied the number of separate articles in the last twelve months that mention each Scorecard company, we ended up with the following data:

"Revenue Rank" is based on 1993 Soft.letter 100 rankings. "Ballot Ratio" reflects the percentage of Leadership Scorecard voters who have some opinion about each company's performance (counting each performance category as a separate vote).

Not surprisingly, Microsoft turns out to be the clear front runner in the visibility sweepstakes--16,850 mentions, equal to 23% of all the articles in the Computer Select database. Other software companies tend to get about as much trade press coverage as their relative size warrants. (The one conspicuous exception is Autodesk, a company that traditionally focuses its publicity efforts almost exclusively on vertical market publications.)

In fact, when we divide total press mentions by calendar 1992 revenues, the chart shows an almost perfect match between volume of coverage and company size: 5-6 mentions per million dollars in revenues. Moreover, as the above-average ratio of mentions for Novell and Adobe demonstrate, trade press visibility doesn't seem to have much to do with press tours, high-level schmoozing, or even the competence of a company's public relations program. In the final analysis, it seems that the the trade press has managed to allocate coverage of top companies in a remarkably even-handed and nonpartisan fashion.

Another point that the chart makes is that company size and visibility in the trade press correlate reasonably well with our so-called "ballot ratio," which measures the percentage of Scorecard respondents who have opinions about a company's management, products, service, and marketing. Again, the rule of thumb is simple: The bigger the company, the better known its performance is likely to be.

What these numbers don't measure, however, is whether press mentions and visibility translate into a favorable opinion about the company's performance. As Intuit proves, a relatively small company can build a strikingly positive industry reputation with just a tiny amount of press coverage (in Intuit's case, 210 mentions, the fewest of any Scorecard company, and the second-lowest ratio of mentions to revenues). To the extent that a favorable industry reputation helps influence customers, investors, employees, and 'other constituencies, it seems that nice guys actually do finish first.