Latest news with #reputation
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Digitalia 21 Launches Proprietary Reputation Strategy to Help Companies Convert Visibility into Market Value
Roma, It , July 28, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Digitalia 21, a strategic communications studio, has launched a proprietary method to help companies turn visibility into market value by strengthening their reputation. The announcement comes amid mounting data that underscores the financial impact of corporate perception. Foto Gio Talente In 2024, the market sent a clear message: corporate reputation is no longer an accessory, but a strategic lever that accounts for up to 28% of market capitalization, according to the Reputation Dividend Report. In the United States alone, companies listed on the S&P 500 lost $182 billion due to the deterioration of their public image. In Italy, the stock exchange (Piazza Affari) saw a value loss of €27.9 billion. 'Anyone who thinks visibility alone is enough to sell is seriously mistaken,' says Gio Talente, founder of Digitalia 21 and recognized as one of Italy's leading experts in reputation, media positioning, and strategic communication. 'Today, the market doesn't reward those who speak the most, but those who are perceived as credible. And credibility can't be bought—it must be built.' In today's landscape—shaped by AI, trust crises, and economic instability—companies can no longer afford to appear without substance. Reputation is what separates the visible from the authoritative. According to Talente, it's the decisive factor that turns visibility into revenue, notoriety into investment, and words into opportunity. Digitalia 21 has developed a proprietary method that combines editorial strategy, personal branding, and institutional communication. The results? SMEs and professionals who tripled commercial inquiries after a targeted reputation campaign, or secured strategic funding following a single feature in national media. 'It's no longer the time for likes,' warns Talente. 'It's the time for decisions. And only those who are recognized as authoritative will sit at the tables that matter: those of investors, partners, and clients.' Today, reputation is a measurable economic asset. The data confirms it: 94% of analyzed companies increased shareholder value thanks to a strong reputation. Sectors like technology, healthcare, and basic materials attribute up to 52% of their market value to reputation. A standout case is Nvidia, where 58% of its market capitalization is based on brand trust, surpassing even its financial performance. Yet in Italy, a structured culture around reputation is still lacking. 'We have entrepreneurs who spend millions on advertising but not a single euro to position themselves as trustworthy. They talk to everyone, but no one truly listens,' Talente points out. With Italy's GDP growing only 0.3% in Q1 2025 and industrial production down 1.8%, trust has become the rarest currency in the market. In this fragile scenario, reputation is not just a competitive advantage—it's a gatekeeper for relevance. 'Either you invest in your reputation now, or you'll be excluded from the decisions that matter,' concludes Talente. 'The countdown has already begun. And without reputation, no strategy can survive.'Foto Gio Talente About Digitalia 21 Digitalia 21 is a studio of professionals in strategic communication. It works alongside Italian professionals, businesses and institutions. The CEO, Gio Talente, is a communications expert for the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers, speaker for the University of Rome Tor Vergata and for the Pontifical Urbaniana University of the Vatican Press Inquiries Digitalia 21 Gio Talente Sign in to access your portfolio
ABC News
3 days ago
- Politics
- ABC News
Annabel Digance files lawsuit against SA premier, claiming she was a victim of prosecution
Former South Australian MP Annabel Digance has launched a $2.3 million lawsuit against Premier Peter Malinauskas, claiming that he led a "malicious prosecution" in an attempt to damage her reputation. Documents filed in the Supreme Court by Ms Digance, against Mr Malinauskas and the State of South Australia, claim the former MP was a victim of a prosecution "motivated by [the premier's] own personal and political advantage". Ms Digance and her husband, Greg Digance, were previously facing blackmail charges in the Adelaide Magistrates Court after allegedly threatening to make allegations of misconduct against Mr Malinauskas in 2020 — when he was leader of the opposition. Those charges were dropped in April 2023. The court documents, filed by Sydney-based law firm Carroll & O'Dea Solicitors on behalf of Ms Digance, claim she was "maliciously prosecuted" by Mr Malinauskas, SA Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions. "The Applicant also alleges trespass to person and property, wrongful arrest and false imprisonment by the SA Police," the document reads. The document goes on to claim that Mr Malinauskas was "motivated to maximise his own and SA Labor's prospects of success at the 2022 state election" and that he, or a member of the SA Police, had provided information to the media in an attempt to "maximise the public humiliation of Mrs Digance". In a statement to ABC News, the premier said he was not surprised by the lawsuit. "It is not surprising the Digances have chosen to take this course of action, considering their previous behaviour," he said. "All I have ever wanted is for the Digances to leave me alone. "The Digances won't distract me from delivering for the people of South Australia." The case is due to be heard in the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
How the riches of its graduates tied Edinburgh University to slavery
Robert Halliday Gunning was a Victorian success story, an Edinburgh-trained doctor who amassed a fortune in Brazil's goldmines before lavishing his wealth on philanthropic gifts. It also appears he was eaten by guilt. In later life, he ensured his legacy would be linked to acts of benevolence: from the 1880s onwards he paid for endowments, prizes, medals, lectures and academic posts at Edinburgh University, several of which still bear his name. Today they are worth £5.3m. Gunning, a former Edinburgh medical student and anatomist, had been enmeshed in Brazil's enslavement-based gold mining industry. Decades after slavery was criminalised in Britain, he was widely believed to own up to 40 enslaved people – a charge he denied. A recently discovered letter suggests his gifts were a calculated act of reputation washing. He told the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, another institution that enjoyed his largesse, he had 'come forward without being asked, to relieve my conscience, and leave behind what I cannot take away when life ends, and I feel it no sacrifice but an honour to do so'. Gunning was one of hundreds of Edinburgh graduates who made their fortunes from the transatlantic slave trade, on plantations in the Americas or profiting from the empire. They served as doctors on slave ships, administrators, lawyers to enslavers, merchants, plantation owners, or were slavers themselves. The scale of Edinburgh University's entanglements with transatlantic slavery and colonialism has been exposed by new research, commissioned by the university. It has established that Edinburgh raised the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds from donors implicated in slavery or colonial wealth-building. A study by Dr Simon Buck, a research fellow, has found Edinburgh raised at least £250,000 (in historical money) from slavery-linked and colonial donors from the late 1700s until well into the late 1800s. The university sought out those donors, despite bitter and public divisions among students and staff over the morality of enslavement. Buck calculates the donations were equivalent to at least £30m based on current retail prices, derived from tobacco, sugar, cotton, gold, silk, indigo, linen, iron and opium production and trading. Based on present-day earnings, a different measure, that is equivalent to £202m today, or as much as £845m based on the UK's growth in overall wealth and productivity since then. Buck calculates at least £6,258 (in historical money) was raised from hundreds of slavery- and empire-linked donors between 1789 and 1794, about 17% of the total philanthropic donations. That equates to about £1m today based on retail price inflation, or £11m based on growth in earnings. How we present the worth of historical sums of money There are different ways of calculating the present-day value of money spent in previous on work by the Measuring Worth Foundation, Edinburgh University's academics have adopted three measures: the most conservative model is relative price worth (RPW) which measures purchasing power, followed by relative wage or income worth (RWIW) and then finally relative output worth (ROW).For comparison, Edinburgh calculated that the £6,258 it raised in the 1790s to help build a new college building would be worth £955,000 today using the RPW model, £10.9m using the RWIW measure or as much as £78.7m using the ROW Guardian tends to use relative price worth as its main figure, but we have included the other measures for comparison. Similar networks were deployed to fund construction of a new medical school nearly a century later. Between 1873 and 1885, its fundraisers targeted alumni in Britain's colonies, principally India, the Caribbean, where indentured labour remained rife, and Brazil, where slavery was lawful until 1888. Other UK-based donors had also been enriched by slavery or slavery-derived wealth. In all, Buck calculates that £22,600 came from slavery-linked sources and £3,360 from empire-derived wealth, equivalent to 20% of the medical school's fundraising. As well as the many hundreds of one-off donations for those buildings derived from slavery or colonial wealth, the Edinburgh report found 27 specific endowments from donors directly linked to the slave trade and colonial profiteering. They were given to establish professorial chairs in music, agriculture and engineering, or to fund student bursaries, prizes and scholarships. Ten bequests are still active, including Gunning's, which are worth at least £9.4m today, a total that does not factor in the awards paid out over the past two centuries. The sums involved, Buck argues, are an underestimate. The lives of those who were enslaved are largely invisible, but some people have been identified. In 1817, Carpenter Quacco, Nanny Pungy, Phibba and Benneba were among 364 enslaved people registered by Samuel Athill, an Antigua-born medicine alumnus and donor who fought against abolition. There are glimpses of other sources of slavery- or empire-derived funding. Some were directly implicated in enslaving people. During the 1690s, before the union of the Scottish and English parliaments, several professors at the university, its rector and several future donors became investors in the Company of Scotland, a Scottish attempt to create a slavery-based plantation business. Best known for its failed attempt in 1699 to found a colony in Darién, Panama, the Company of Scotland traded in enslaved people and cargo linked to slavery in 1698, 1699, 1701 and 1708 in Madagascar and the Indian Ocean. There were bursaries active at Edinburgh until at least 1971 funded by its investors. According to the report, Edinburgh's town council, which originally owned the university, gave it money raised from taxing slavery-linked ships carrying tobacco, sugar and cotton in the port of Leith. Queen Anne, one of many British monarchs with clear links to transatlantic slavery, funded professorships. Many of the ways in which the university benefited from enslavement are hidden from view, but some are still very visible. Five of Edinburgh's best-known historical buildings were constructed with help from slavery-enriched donors: two former sites of the Royal Infirmary hospital – which was partly run using profits from a Jamaican plantation it owned; the St Cecilia's Hall music collection; the New College, built on the Mound by the Free Church of Scotland, and the Edinburgh College of Art. And the university's accountants were shrewd investors. Buck has discovered its slavery-derived wealth was invested in numerous Scottish Highland estates, war bonds, railway companies and colonial government bonds between 1896 and 1946. Limited time made it impossible to calculate how much profit those investments generated.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- The Guardian
How the riches of its graduates tied Edinburgh University to slavery
Robert Halliday Gunning was a Victorian success story, an Edinburgh-trained doctor who amassed a fortune in Brazil's goldmines before lavishing his wealth on philanthropic gifts. It also appears he was eaten by guilt. In later life, he ensured his legacy would be linked to acts of benevolence: from the 1880s onwards he paid for endowments, prizes, medals, lectures and academic posts at Edinburgh University, several of which still bear his name. Today they are worth £5.3m. Gunning, a former Edinburgh medical student and anatomist, had been enmeshed in Brazil's enslavement-based gold mining industry. Decades after slavery was criminalised in Britain, he was widely believed to own up to 40 enslaved people – a charge he denied. A recently discovered letter suggests his gifts were a calculated act of reputation washing. He told the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, another institution that enjoyed his largesse, he had 'come forward without being asked, to relieve my conscience, and leave behind what I cannot take away when life ends, and I feel it no sacrifice but an honour to do so'. Gunning was one of hundreds of Edinburgh graduates who made their fortunes from the transatlantic slave trade, on plantations in the Americas or profiting from the empire. They served as doctors on slave ships, administrators, lawyers to enslavers, merchants, plantation owners, or were slavers themselves. The scale of Edinburgh University's entanglements with transatlantic slavery and colonialism has been exposed by new research, commissioned by the university. It has established that Edinburgh raised the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds from donors implicated in slavery or colonial wealth-building. A study by Dr Simon Buck, a research fellow, has found Edinburgh raised at least £250,000 (in historical money) from slavery-linked and colonial donors from the late 1700s until well into the late 1800s. The university sought out those donors, despite bitter and public divisions among students and staff over the morality of enslavement. Buck calculates the donations were equivalent to at least £30m based on current retail prices, derived from tobacco, sugar, cotton, gold, silk, indigo, linen, iron and opium production and trading. Based on present-day earnings, a different measure, that is equivalent to £202m today, or as much as £845m based on the UK's growth in overall wealth and productivity since then. Buck calculates at least £6,258 (in historical money) was raised from hundreds of slavery- and empire-linked donors between 1789 and 1794, about 17% of the total philanthropic donations. That equates to about £1m today based on retail price inflation, or £11m based on growth in earnings. How we present the worth of historical sums of money There are different ways of calculating the present-day value of money spent in previous on work by the Measuring Worth Foundation, Edinburgh University's academics have adopted three measures: the most conservative model is relative price worth (RPW) which measures purchasing power, followed by relative wage or income worth (RWIW) and then finally relative output worth (ROW).For comparison, Edinburgh calculated that the £6,258 it raised in the 1790s to help build a new college building would be worth £955,000 today using the RPW model, £10.9m using the RWIW measure or as much as £78.7m using the ROW Guardian tends to use relative price worth as its main figure, but we have included the other measures for comparison. Similar networks were deployed to fund construction of a new medical school nearly a century later. Between 1873 and 1885, its fundraisers targeted alumni in Britain's colonies, principally India, the Caribbean, where indentured labour remained rife, and Brazil, where slavery was lawful until 1888. Other UK-based donors had also been enriched by slavery or slavery-derived wealth. In all, Buck calculates that £22,600 came from slavery-linked sources and £3,360 from empire-derived wealth, equivalent to 20% of the medical school's fundraising. As well as the many hundreds of one-off donations for those buildings derived from slavery or colonial wealth, the Edinburgh report found 27 specific endowments from donors directly linked to the slave trade and colonial profiteering. They were given to establish professorial chairs in music, agriculture and engineering, or to fund student bursaries, prizes and scholarships. Ten bequests are still active, including Gunning's, which are worth at least £9.4m today, a total that does not factor in the awards paid out over the past two centuries. The sums involved, Buck argues, are an underestimate. The lives of those who were enslaved are largely invisible, but some people have been identified. In 1817, Carpenter Quacco, Nanny Pungy, Phibba and Benneba were among 364 enslaved people registered by Samuel Athill, an Antigua-born medicine alumnus and donor who fought against abolition. There are glimpses of other sources of slavery- or empire-derived funding. Some were directly implicated in enslaving people. During the 1690s, before the union of the Scottish and English parliaments, several professors at the university, its rector and several future donors became investors in the Company of Scotland, a Scottish attempt to create a slavery-based plantation business. Best known for its failed attempt in 1699 to found a colony in Darién, Panama, the Company of Scotland traded in enslaved people and cargo linked to slavery in 1698, 1699, 1701 and 1708 in Madagascar and the Indian Ocean. There were bursaries active at Edinburgh until at least 1971 funded by its investors. According to the report, Edinburgh's town council, which originally owned the university, gave it money raised from taxing slavery-linked ships carrying tobacco, sugar and cotton in the port of Leith. Queen Anne, one of many British monarchs with clear links to transatlantic slavery, funded professorships. Many of the ways in which the university benefited from enslavement are hidden from view, but some are still very visible. Five of Edinburgh's best-known historical buildings were constructed with help from slavery-enriched donors: two former sites of the Royal Infirmary hospital – which was partly run using profits from a Jamaican plantation it owned; the St Cecilia's Hall music collection; the New College, built on the Mound by the Free Church of Scotland, and the Edinburgh College of Art. And the university's accountants were shrewd investors. Buck has discovered its slavery-derived wealth was invested in numerous Scottish Highland estates, war bonds, railway companies and colonial government bonds between 1896 and 1946. Limited time made it impossible to calculate how much profit those investments generated.
Entrepreneur
5 days ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Why I Almost Always Choose Referrals When Hiring — And You Should Too
Referrals are no longer optional but necessary. In today's competitive and security-driven environment, hiring through referrals is essential to safeguard your company brand and reputation. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Many ask me, "Why focus your business growth on referrals?" My answer is simple: referrals are the fastest and most effective way to bring the right people on board while minimizing risk. In the rush to hire quickly or cut costs, companies often bypass referrals in favor of cold applications or mass job boards. While casting a wide net might seem efficient, it actually exposes your business to significant risks. This approach can create dangerous blind spots that put your company's most valuable assets — security, data and intellectual property — at risk. Referrals are more than convenience — they're a critical layer of security Building and nurturing professional networks isn't just good career advice; it's essential for business security. When someone refers a candidate, they're putting their own reputation on the line. This inherent accountability acts as a first line of defense. In contrast, applicants from job boards or open applications often come without shared connections or any built-in accountability. That increases risks ranging from candidates misrepresenting themselves to malicious insiders or even competitors planting infiltrators. Related: 5 Surprising Benefits of Professional Networking That You Need to Know About Insider threats are a real and costly danger Studies show that insider threats account for over 34% of data breaches. These threats aren't always malicious — many stem from negligent hires unfamiliar with security protocols. Cold hires are harder to vet thoroughly. Referrals, however, come with firsthand insights into a candidate's professionalism and ethical standards. This added context can be the difference between a secure organization and one vulnerable to expensive intellectual property theft, data leaks or reputational damage. How to maximize referrals in your hiring strategy: Nurture your professional network: Build genuine relationships by engaging with others and understanding their experiences. Benefit: Trusted connections lead to higher-quality referrals with built-in credibility. Set clear hiring goals: Define the culture and skills you want in your team to ensure referral candidates align well. Benefit: Referrals come with insights into character and fit, backed by trusted networks. Maintain regular, thoughtful communication: Connect consistently — not just when you need something. Benefit: Active relationships keep your network engaged and ready to support mutual referrals. Leverage online platforms that facilitate referrals: Use tools designed to streamline referral-based hiring and expand your reach. Benefit: Discover more qualified candidates through trusted, structured referral channels. Related: How to Lower the Risks to Your Brand Reputation (and Build an Image that Wins New Business) A smarter, safer hiring strategy In today's high-risk business environment, hiring through referrals is more than a cultural advantage — it's a vital security strategy. Building your team through trusted networks adds accountability and trust that anonymous hires simply can't provide. This approach protects your company's brand, reputation and long-term growth. If you want to grow securely, safeguard your intellectual property, and minimize avoidable risks, centering your hiring strategy on trusted referrals isn't just smart — it's necessary. Ready to break through your revenue ceiling? Join us at Level Up, a conference for ambitious business leaders to unlock new growth opportunities.
