Name a business that recently lost not just customers, but also stock value through a major customer service/PR snafu. What about a highly paid celebrity TV star who lost a contract over his behavior? Or, less recently, a large international business with an environmental crisis on its hands? (Answers: Netflix, Charlie Sheen and BP respectively.) Each of these entities will now be lucky if the public can ever disassociate them from their actions—or more accurately, their responses.
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The business of reputation management is an important one to consider now whatever the size of your business or personal status. Chances are you will never have to deal with a reputation disaster like those above, but laying the foundation for protecting your reputation will have a significant impact on the future of your business.
Listen
In a recent post on this blog, Christian Arno discussed Managing Your Online Reputation Across Different Languages and laid down the foundation for all reputation management: Know who’s talking about you and where. Arno mentioned Google Alerts as a great way to track what is being said online about your business. Other methods involve monitoring chatter across other social media or local business platforms.
Conduct an initial search for your brand and/or business across these platforms:
- Google; obviously the number one search tool, Google is the first place to start research into your online footprint.
- Twitter; it isn’t necessary to have a hashtag associated with your brand or business to search Twitter for names or keywords associated with them. Twitter is a very valuable search tool, especially when it comes to pinpointing exact references to anything related to your business.
- Facebook; recently Facebook launched a new tool called “People Talking About This,” which will allow page or brand owners to see conversations related to them in their Insights dashboard.
Other than the major three, other valuable sites to monitor are LinkedIn, Google+ and rating services like Yelp, eOpinions and the like.
Establish Your Domain
Now you need to establish your business pages on all those platforms you searched for information about your brand and business. Make sure you also own any domains associated with your brand and/or business. This will allow you to consistently establish your brand across the most seen platforms online. Also work with an SEO consultant or optimize your business pages yourself to make consistent use of keywords you would like associated with your brand and business.
Respond
A major part of both Netflix and BP’s PR and customer problems were caused by not addressing the negative situation head on. Keep the communication channels open, but consider your response to online attacks carefully. Allow negative comments to remain on your blog or social platform sites and listen to what the commenter has to say. But also be prepared to respond to highly visible attacks on your brand and/or business with a plan in place.
This plan could include designating a person to represent your company who becomes known across your social channels and responds to any commentary, negative or positive. It could include having a written script of responses prepared to draw the attention of listeners to more positive angles of the situation/company/product/ employee. It could even be simply thanking the negative commenter and asking them if they would like to email you more information about their issue.
Reputation management is essential for the success of your brand and business. Once you have laid a foundation in place like that suggested above, you will be able to easily keep track of your impact. Having a plan set to deal with negative attacks will also allow you the peace of mind to calmly address issues that have derailed much larger entities. Protecting the current and future reputation of your brand and business is an important step towards cultivating the success you want.
Jen, I would say this should be the most important part of establishing an online presence. Entrepreneurs shouldn’t get distracted with things such as viral marketing if those tactics are going to damage their reputation. They create short-term results, but you need to prioritize your reputation above all else.
As to the points you cover in your article, I think Google, Twitter and Facebook are great places to start. If you are a more local business, I would suggest checking local online publications and scanning comments as well.
Very informative article, but I’d like to add one more important moment. To have a good business reputation, you should watch over all the comments and reviews that exist on the Internet about your business. Usually on forums. Because here you can find reviews of people who aren’t very satisfied with your products or services. And you should immediately react to this. You should answer them in public (I mean on this forum or site), try to explain them something etc. This will help other people to understand that you are serious organization which tries to meet all customers’ requirements and wishes)
Forums are important. I would be interested in hearing more about your strategies for engaging with commenters. Thank you for your comment.
Jens,
Pleasure to read you here.
I think I am guilty of #1 Listen, I often need to listen more and yes it’s ironic as a coach but although I do this professionally I don’t do it enough for my marketing.
Great points and a good reminder for me.
Somehow I find that very hard to believe John.
But I hear you. Paying attention to marketing cues is definitely an acquired skill.
Hi Jen,
Thanks for the tip about Facebook’s “People Talking About This” tool. I honestly have been a bit overwhelmed (and frustrated) by the recent changes there. I’ll definitely check it out.
Sherryl, I also recommend this great article about the “People Talking About This Tool.” Understanding Facebook insights about your page can greatly help you gauge the conversation.
I agree, definitely an nice new feature!
Thanks for contributing this great article Jen… I very much appreciate it as well as I’m sure the readers do.
Thank you so much all for your comments!
@Kalen Checking local online publications are definitely a good idea to add to this list.
Excellent. I think that protecting a brand is probably more difficult than building one. It is indeed essential to manage your brand well to ensure that nothing “negative” gets associated with it. This is actually true not only online but also offline. BTW, curious as why you have not added LinkedIn on your list of platforms?
Good question as LinkedIn is just as important. Glad you spotted that!
Excellent points here Jen. Building an online reputation indeed needs careful planning and we need a lot of resources to protect it. Even if the foundation of reputation is good, we still need to make efforts to maintain that established reputation. I have read the previous blog about managing online reputation across different languages and the content is so true and informative. Listening is also part of building online reputation so we can know when and how to call for back ups.
I like the article you made Jen. Planning is the main key in building your reputation. In the planning process you can already see how you will gain trust and credibility for your reputaion and to your site.