I have had an idea for a few years that I'd like some advice on. I want to create a "Rated C for Corporate" campaign of sorts. It is inspired by the fact that we rate movies and tv and games, but not the very corporations who create so much of what we buy. There is plenty of information for stockholders with regard to corporate behavior, but very little available that is relevant to stakeholders (communities and consumers) and presented or visualized in a simple way the general public can easily understand.

"Rated C for Corporate" would be composed of two parts:

1. A crowdsourced site would allow people to contribute information about companies. The kind of metrics that I imagine collecting would be ratings on CEO pay (versus lowest paid employee), effect on environment, community activity, etc. These metrics should be normalized as a simple 1-10 rating. What kind of metrics do you think would be relevant? What crowdsourcing tool would be most appropriate?

2. The collected information from the site could then be used to make stickers the company name and a graphic of the metrics. This is a rough draft, but I envision something like this:

dl.dropbox.com

People could then place these stickers on ads, products (or anywhere they want).

The trick is to overcome the Yelp Conundrum, in which crowdsourced ratings are basically worthless due to individual customers' vendettas and weird metrics. How open-to-the-public would input be?

Yeah, I'd like it to be more than ratings. For instance, the Pay Ratio wouldn't be a rating of how well people felt they were paid, but rather a metric that described the ratio between highest and lowest paid employee. (I'll try to drum up an example). A really simple example would be salaries as a percentage of revenue (a loose measure of how well companies pay their employees). For example FedEx reported that 37% of their revenues went to salaries and employee benefits. I'd want to collect information like this from annual reports and be sure that the information could be verified.

Forbes and Fortune magazine already do something similar in rating their top ten companies to work for every year so their reporters must have ready access to accurate information provided by the companies themselves? Seems there should be an incentive for any corporation to want to participate openly in your ratings or it risks being percieved only as "Vendetta" as Jordan point out?

I agree that the information is likely out there; and that it should be verifiable to avoid "vendetta" ratings. To that end, I would have no problem with companies editing their own profiles provided they *also* provided verifiable stats. But like Wikipedia and "person" pages; any manipulation should be carefully watched. Furthermore, I wouldn't want to create a service re-inventing the better business bureau (bbb.org). There should be no fees for being listed, at all. I'm not entirely confident with the BBB stats.

There's also a shakedown element to BBB: free to complain, but costs $$$ to respond.