Tag: Reputation

What Is The Meaning Of Reputation Management?

In this world where business is news-driven, it is crucial for companies to maintain a good reputation, which will steer them to success. Companies establish such corporate identities that not only define what they stand for, but also have a positive or negative impact on their clients. Herein, the concept of reputation management is established. Reputation management is a way of keeping a track of people’s actions and opinions. Reputation management keeps a report of these opinions and creates a feedback loop. It also involves the process of transforming the negative opinions into a positive one. Tracking and reporting is done by word-of-mouth as well as statistical analysis of innumerable data points.

Why Reputation Management?

CEOs and senior management have understood the importance of reputation management and how reputation can either make or break a company. If a company has an excellent reputation, it is sure to attract business and investment partners, boost sales, hire employees, convince lawmakers and legislators, and overall have a huge positive impact on everyone. The reverse will happen if the company lacks a good reputation. Having a firm reputation builds confidence for the future of the company. In a time when there are busy markets, it can push for profitable sales, draw as well as retain competent employees, deter competition, make requests to business partners and capital investors, besides numerous other advantages.

Tools And Techniques

Building a firm reputation requires certain tools and techniques such as media content analysis, KPIs (key performance indicators), stakeholders’ evaluation, opinion polls, reputation scorecards, competitive benchmarks, internal communications and new media measurement, and research in a crisis. However, these techniques to boost a company’s reputation are only a support system to a whole range of other systems, which include carrying out surveys and making a study on the company reputation, surveys on corporate image, and comprehensive studies on thought leadership, research on stakeholders, and various rating methods in PR and communications as well as their measurements. Such techniques are incorporated so as to eliminate all kinds of negative publicity and maintain a strong, firm reputation in the eyes of the public.

How It Is Done

Having a complete reputation management system that is proactive, reactive and that which takes constant measures, ensures that the company’s reputation is protected, intact and improved. Some methods are:

Conducting PR campaigns:In order to keep up with the ever-changing pace of business, the company will have to continuously promote its reputation. This can be achieved through PR campaigns for launching its new products and services to its prospective clients.

Giving prompt responses:Companies can also keep good relations with their customers by responding promptly to their queries and complaints via phone, mail or email.

Incorporating reactive reputation management:In the case of a problem having arisen, it is recommended that the company resort to reactive reputation management to control the damage and resolve ongoing issues.

Having reliable communication plans:Having a reliable communication plan ensures that the company’s present reputation is enhanced.

Hiring reputed providers:Companies need to hire well-known reputation management providers to implement proficiently designed measures, which will build the company’s reputation.

Top Reasons Every Small Business Must Perform Online Reputation Management

One of the biggest mistakes any small business owner can make is to believe they don’t need to engage in online reputation management, just because they run a small business.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the very fact that you run a small business makes it all the more imperative to manage your online brand image for two reasons:

1. Customer referrals are the lifeblood of all small businesses

2. You don’t have the luxury of a large marketing budget to control negative reviews or restore a damaged reputation like a large business can.

Let’s look at the first three reasons why online reputation management matters to small business owners:

* ONLINE SEARCH

The massive growth in online media and the rapid decline in offline media has made it necessary for small and large businesses alike to change direction and focus on their online image.

More and more people the world over look for information on just about everything from the web and this applies to information about your local business.

Your target market is more apt to look for your business online through a Google, Yahoo or Bing search rather than leafing through a Yellow Pages Directory book.

* SPEED

The speed at which online media operates can make or break your business in a matter of minutes or hours.

A viral tweet, video, blog post or status update can be viewed by thousands if not millions of people in a span of a day creating a much more powerful effect in a shorter time than any traditional offline media.

Even a small local news story can be broadcast across the nation with a YouTube video.

If the news story was positive, a small business can get a lot of positive PR and increased sales, but if it was negative, it can literally destroy the business.

Plus we all know that bad news spreads faster than good news.

* EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Online media is largely an equal playing ground for both small and large businesses, so any business no matter its size can get exposure, criticism and accolades on the internet.

This means that even small businesses cannot afford to ignore online reputation management because the internet has made the world so much of a smaller place.

The emphasis placed on local search by dominant web players such as Google, Facebook, Yelp and others, has given more power and opportunity for small businesses to grow their presence online.

Yet this increased awareness has also made it critical for any small business to know how to handle the huge public exposure and scrutiny that is part of the package.

Here are three more reasons why small business owners must pay attention to their online reputation.

* ECOMMERCE

Ecommerce has made it so much easier for small business to grow beyond their town or city locale to nationwide or even international market.

Online shopping carts and payment processors have made this all possible, meaning that as a small business engaged in ecommerce, managing your online reputation is crucial to protect your online sales.

Negative reviews about your products, services and customer service can damage your online sales, which can be certainly be detrimental if your small business makes more money from ecommerce than in-store sales.

In addition, when you consider how certain towns, cities and states have had poor growth in the current economic recession, ecommerce can be the lifeblood of a small business trying to survive.

* SOCIAL PROOF

One of the biggest social phenomenons of ecommerce is social proof.

Do you know that an overwhelming majority of surfers do not trust advertisements but instead trust endorsements and reviews from people in their social networks or from ordinary people like themselves?

This is what makes consumer review sites so popular and how it is so easy to convince a new client to do business with you once they have read positive reviews about your company.

Therefore in order to protect your online reputation, it is important to know what people are saying about your business because this is the single most important influencing force behind a potential clients purchasing decision.

* ONLINE SEO

What many business owners fail to understand is how permanent a footprint bad publicity leaves on the web.

Once content has been published on a website, indexed by the search engines and shows up in the search results, it is extremely difficult to have that content removed.

It is not as easy as telling Google to remove the offending page because they have no power to do that.

It often involves contacting the webmaster of the blog or site where the content was posted and trying to convince them to delete the content, make the page invisible to search engines or to remove the page.

This is often quite difficult as they have ownership rights over the site.

Even if you resort to legal measures and they eventually remove the content, it is still difficult for that content to get totally off the internet radar especially if the content was widely circulated or went viral.

Online content is definitely very sticky and something that happened many years ago can haunt your business reputation for many years to come.

Exit mobile version