Reputation risk was named the number one risk in a 2013 Deloitte survey, conducted by Forbes Insights.

Deloitte said that was due in large part to the rise of social media, which enabled instant global communications, making it harder for companies to control how they were perceived in the marketplace.

Reputation risk was the overall top risk and the biggest risk in most individual sectors. Three years ago, reputation was already in the top risks in financial services and it remains there.

In the energy sector, while reputation risk was not in the top five three years ago, it was number one in the 2013 survey. Deloitte said that was perhaps fuelled by headlines about fracking, oil spills, and the Alberta tar sands - large deposits of heavy crude oil in Canada.

A similar rise in reputation risk occurred in life sciences and health care, likely driven by health care reform efforts in the US and ongoing concerns about the skyrocketing cost of pharmaceuticals and health services.

However, Risk Management Institution of Australasia president Bryan Whitefield does not consider reputation a risk. Writing in Risk Management Partners: “Reputation is not a risk. It is an intangible asset and its value to you is enhanced or damaged by something you or your organisation does or does not do.

“What is an executive implying when they indicate ‘reputation’ as one of their top risks? Are they saying they are concerned their reputation may be damaged because they have trouble managing their reputation or are they saying they are concerned that risk events may occur that will damage their reputation? In reality the answers are one and the same. One needs to manage risk to manage one’s reputation and one needs to be thinking about reputation when making decisions.

“The bigger question that comes from a discussion about reputation and risk is how to obtain an effective measure of the potential or actual impact of a risk on reputation and therefore on your overall ability to achieve your goals,” he said.

The Deloitte study included more than 300 respondents from the Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, and Asia/Pacific. Deloitte’s aim was to better understand how businesses could manage strategic risk more effectively.

Strategic risk was a major focus, with 81% of surveyed companies explicitly managing strategic risk – rather than limiting their focus to traditional risk areas, such as operational, financial and compliance risk.

Asked ‘Does your organisation have an explicit focus on managing strategic risks?’, 81% of Asia/Pacific region companies said yes.

Nearly all respondents (94%) had changed their approach to strategic risk management over the past three years. The numbers were slightly higher in Asia/Pacific (96%) and slightly lower in Europe/Middle East/Africa (91%).

Phil Maxwell, Coca-Cola’s enterprise risk management director, said: “It used to be that if certain risks were to happen, a company could have up to a news cycle to respond. The speed of risks is so much greater now, and as a result you have to be more prepared – faster to respond than you were in the past. That’s one of the biggest differences today versus even three or four years ago.”

The survey found other technologies were having a major impact on the business and risk landscape - 53% of surveyed companies believed technology enablers and disrupters, such as social, mobile and big data, could threaten their established business models, and 91% had changed their business strategies since those technologies began to emerge.

Regionally, the biggest impact was in Asia/Pacific, where 98% of respondents reported having changed their business strategies.

The survey report offered insights into what companies in most major industries and regions around the world were doing to manage strategic risk more effectively and how they were using strategic risk management as a tool to make decisions with more confidence and to create greater business value.

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