Reputation capital is the quantitative measure of some entity's reputational value in some context – a community or marketplace.^{[citation needed]} In the world of Web 2.0, what is increasingly valuable is trying to measure the effects of collaboration and contribution to community.^{[citation needed]} Reputation capital is often seen as a form of non-cash remuneration for their efforts, and generally generates respect within the community or marketplace where the capital is generated.

Examples

• eBay has a seller rating that attempts to represent trustworthiness of a seller. A negative rating of 1% can decrease the selling price of an item by 4%.^[1]
• Google's PageRank is a measure of popularity of a site, and for individual blogs, gives a rating of this, and as a result, of the bloggers themselves.
• Technorati has an authority rating based on incoming links to blogs that it has found in its Blogosphere
• This has been more coarsely defined as A, B, or C-list blogger rating.^[2]
• Slashdot and reddit's karma mechanisms

Definition

For a business, reputation capital is the sum of the value of all corporate intangible assets, which include: business processes, patents, trademarks; reputations for ethics and integrity; quality, safety, sustainability, security, and resilience.^[3]

Delivering functional and social expectations of the public on the one hand and manage to build a unique identity on the other hand creates trust and this trust builds the informal framework of a company. This framework provides "return in cooperation" and produces Reputation Capital. A positive reputation will secure a company or organisation long-term competitive advantages. The higher the Reputation Capital, the less the costs for supervising and exercising control.^[4]

Reputation capital is a corporate asset that can be managed, accumulated and traded in for trust, legitimisation of a position of power and social recognition, a premium price for goods and services offered, a stronger willingness among shareholders to hold on to shares in times of crisis, or a stronger readiness to invest in the company's stock.^[4]