Shankarsoma

14/08/2026

Proud to be Indian. 🇮🇳

80th Independence Day.

A democracy the world said could not hold together — still holding, still becoming.

Jai Hind.

12/08/2026

There is a pattern I have seen in organisations where customer acquisition has become progressively more expensive over time. The investigation starts with marketing — campaigns are reviewed, targeting is refined, new channels are tested. Performance sometimes improves. But the improvement is harder to sustain than it used to be, and the spend required to maintain it keeps increasing.

What is often happening in these situations is that marketing has become responsible for overcoming hesitation that did not originate within marketing. Customers are finding the organisation and taking longer to trust what they see. That is not a campaign problem. It is a confidence problem — and it tends to show up in acquisition cost before it shows up anywhere else.

The organisations that diagnose this early tend to look at what customers are finding when they search independently, what the review landscape looks like, and whether there are patterns in how concerns are being handled. Those questions reveal more than another round of campaign analysis when the underlying issue is that the market has quietly become less confident.

If this reflects something your organisation is navigating, the full article is worth reading.

https://www.shankarsoma.com/cac-increases-before-reputation-issues-are-diagnosed/

When customer acquisition cost begins to rise, the investigation usually starts with marketing. In most cases, it should start with trust — and trust tends to shift well before the commercial metrics reflect it.

07/08/2026

India just cut the deepfake takedown deadline from 36 hours to 3.

This is the first time I've seen a rule that actually gives brands and individuals a real legal lever against deepfakes and AI impersonation, rather than just a request that platforms can quietly ignore.

But I keep asking myself: can platforms genuinely verify notices, track down every re-upload, and tell satire apart from an unlawful deepfake, all within 3 hours, without wrongly removing legitimate content along the way?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-hours-kill-deepfake-even-enough-time-soma-shankar-pcboc/

Would love to know what others think: is a 3-hour deadline realistic, or are we trading accuracy for speed?

05/08/2026

One of the biggest assumptions in revenue forecasting is that customer behaviour will remain broadly consistent. Sales pipelines, conversion rates, retention, and growth projections all depend on that belief holding true.

What is often overlooked is that reputation influences each of those behaviours long before it influences revenue itself. When trust begins to weaken, the first signs are not financial — they are behavioural. Longer sales cycles. More cautious customers. Renewals that happen but do not expand. By the time these patterns show up in the numbers, they have usually been developing for several months.

Reputation is not a communications concern that sits outside the financial model. It is a variable operating inside the assumptions the model is built on. Most organisations only discover this after a forecast misses — when the signal was often visible much earlier.

If this connects to something you are seeing in your organisation, the full article is worth reading.

https://www.shankarsoma.com/reputation-is-a-hidden-variable-in-revenue-forecasting/

Revenue forecasts often focus on pipelines, conversion rates, retention, and market conditions. What is frequently overlooked is the role reputation plays in influencing customer confidence, buying behaviour, retention, and long-term growth.

29/07/2026

One thing that appears repeatedly in organisations with genuinely stable reputations: they are predictable. Not in a rigid way — but in the sense that stakeholders know what to expect when something goes wrong.

Reputation stability turns out to be less about making perfect decisions and more about making consistent ones. Stakeholders can tolerate mistakes when they trust that an organisation's responses follow recognisable principles. What erodes trust is unpredictability — when the same type of situation produces different responses depending on circumstances that stakeholders cannot interpret.

That inconsistency is where confidence quietly weakens, even when individual decisions seem reasonable on their own terms. It develops gradually, often without anyone inside the organisation noticing, until it has already begun to affect how trust is extended.

If this connects to something you are working through in your organisation, the full article is worth reading.

https://www.shankarsoma.com/reputation-stability-is-a-function-of-decision-consistency/

Reputation stability is rarely the result of strong outcomes alone. It is the result of decisions made consistently over time — across teams, situations, and stakeholders — in ways that make an organisation predictable enough to be trusted.

23/07/2026

Something I see regularly in organisations that have invested seriously in reputation monitoring: the alerts work, the reports are detailed, the dashboard is active — and yet when something actually happens, the response still takes days rather than hours.

The problem is rarely a lack of information. It is a lack of pre-defined authority. When no one has agreed in advance who can approve a response without routing it through three layers of sign-off, the situation moves faster than the decision-making process can.

Visibility and control are not the same thing. Monitoring tells you what is happening. Response speed determines whether that knowledge changes anything.

If this reflects something you have seen in your own organisation, the full article is worth reading.

https://www.shankarsoma.com/control-is-an-illusion-without-response-speed/

Visibility without response speed creates the appearance of control, not the reality of it. How quickly organisations act after identifying a reputation issue often matters more than how well they monitor it.

15/07/2026

Most organisations only start thinking about reputation when something goes visibly wrong.

By that point, the problem has usually been developing for months — through delayed responses, unresolved concerns, and patterns that felt manageable in isolation but were quietly forming a picture externally.

The moment that attracts attention is rarely the moment the damage began. It is the moment accumulated damage became impossible to ignore.

This is why the organisations that manage reputation well do not wait for a crisis to take it seriously. They treat it as an ongoing leadership discipline — something that requires consistent attention to decisions, processes, and patterns long before any of them become visible problems.

If this resonates with how you think about reputation in your organisation, the full article is worth a read.

https://www.shankarsoma.com/reputation-systems-fail-gradually-then-suddenly/

Reputation systems rarely fail because of a single event. They weaken gradually through delayed responses, inconsistent decisions, and unresolved issues before the breakdown becomes visible.

08/07/2026

One of the biggest misconceptions in marketing is that content creates authority.

It doesn't.

Content can make expertise more visible. It can help people understand how you think. It can amplify credibility that already exists.

What it cannot do is compensate for weak positioning, unclear messaging, or the absence of a meaningful point of view.

Over the years, I've seen organisations invest heavily in content production while overlooking the underlying issues affecting trust and differentiation.

The result is usually more content.

Not more authority.

I recently wrote about this in more detail:

https://www.shankarsoma.com/content-doesnt-build-authority-it-reflects-it/

Many organisations treat content as a way to create authority. In reality, content is more often a reflection of the expertise, clarity, and credibility that already exist.

01/07/2026

One thing that gets underestimated in reputation management is how early the signals usually appear.

The problem is that they rarely feel important at the time.
A recurring complaint.
A question that keeps coming up.
A concern that appears across different conversations.

Individually, none of them seems serious enough to demand immediate attention.
Collectively, they tell a very different story.

Over the years, I've noticed that organisations rarely struggle because they failed to see the signals. More often, they struggle because the signals didn't look urgent enough when they first appeared.

I recently wrote about this in more detail:

https://www.shankarsoma.com/early-signals-are-ignored-because-they-dont-look-urgent/

Most reputation issues are visible long before they become serious. The challenge is not visibility. The challenge is that early signals rarely appear urgent enough to trigger action.

24/06/2026

One thing I've noticed over the years is that reputation rarely weakens because of one major incident.

It usually weakens because small issues are allowed to repeat for too long.

Individually, they look manageable.

Collectively, they shape perception. By the time the issue becomes visible externally, the risk has often been building internally for months.

I've explored this in more detail in my latest article.

https://www.shankarsoma.com/reputation-risk-compounds-before-it-becomes-visible/

Most reputation risks do not appear suddenly. They accumulate through unresolved issues, delayed decisions, and repeated signals long before they become visible externally.