Guest post by Peter Johnson.
A CEO walks a trade show floor, stops at a competitor’s booth for eleven seconds, and forms an opinion that no amount of digital reputation management will undo before the next quarter’s renewal conversation. That’s not a hypothetical.
It’s roughly how fast in-person judgment forms, and it’s happening constantly at exactly the events where B2B companies have spent the least strategic effort protecting their reputation.
Reputation management has become an executive-level concern. According to PwC’s 2025 CEO Survey, 84% of global CEOs now rank reputation risk as their top external threat, ahead of both cyber and regulatory risk. Nearly all of the resulting investment, however, flows into digital monitoring: review response protocols, social listening tools, AI search visibility.