A strong brand helps a company communicate that its offerings are relevant and uniquely able to meet customer needs. Many companies today pour millions of dollars into brand-building campaigns to generate that external awareness, which in theory can speed up the sales cycle. This has become the accepted norm, taught to us by the very advertising agencies we hire. But for businesses, all this great awareness can come crashing down with one online "reputation disaster."
Good and bad reputations are opposite sides of the brand coin. And the ability of consumers today to share their opinions about your company’s brand with just a click of a mouse levels the playing field for everyone and puts your brand in constant peril. This reality underscores the growing importance of online reputation management in a Web 2.0, social media-driven marketplace.
A solid reputation reflects the partners you do business with, the strength of your management team, your company’s financial performance to date, and, ultimately, the types of employees you will hire. Today, millions of customers and prospects engage in social communities on the Web. Facebook alone has 50 million community members, with over half of them logging in daily. Couple that with the ease and ability to create a quick video or podcast, or post a negative comment on a blog, and you have a recipe for reputation disaster.
Unfortunately, when a reputation disaster occurs, it is becoming more difficult for your PR team to execute the usual crisis management playbook because of differences in the types of media, placement of media, and approaches to each medium. This fragmentation makes it increasingly difficult to neutralize criticism and restore reputations when something happens.
Additionally, the Internet already has built-in, automatic reputation ranking systems. Current examples are Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) for companies and eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) for vendors. These reputation ranking engines are quickly becoming extremely effective ways for people to determine how reputable your company is before deciding whether to do business with you.
The bottom line: As media continues to fragment with the explosion of social networks, aggregators like Google will become increasingly important in helping users decide whether or not to do business with you.
So what is a company to do?
I recommend a three-step approach to reputation management called “MRO”:
Monitor. Companies should designate an employee or hire an external service to monitor, moderate, and drive positive discussions.
Respond. Technical staff should be designated to respond to any product or support issues that arise from online communities and take the lead in responding with action plans to any negative sentiments that develop.
Optimize. Companies need to proactively optimize their reputation online over time by exploiting the positive aspects of their brand (an example here is General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE), whose “Ecomagination” campaign is demonstrating the company’s commitment to keeping the environment clean).
Each MRO element is designed to give you a point person for this reputation-protection trifecta:
Monitor gives you a way to see and engage in conversations before they get out of control. People will be a lot more polite online when they know you are listening. The challenge lies in learning about conversations that arise quickly. This is where you need "reputation bulldogs," who can be out there watching all the time.
Respond gives you a dedicated point person internally who can talk about your product or service with authority, and provide clarity on how you might resolve an issue. As I said above, this should be a technical person rather than a communications person. This will convey the company’s commitment to address the issue.
And finally, Optimize. Optimizing your reputation in the marketplace means you go beyond just keeping it on track. You invest in the online aspects of your reputation just as you invest in other dimensions of your brand.
Having a strong brand doesn’t mean you have a strong reputation. Strengthening your brand also involves a commitment to an effective reputation management strategy for the new media. Ignoring this critical factor is a risk that companies can’t afford to take today.
— Paul Dunay, Director Global Field and Interactive Marketing at BearingPoint Inc.
The lead paragraph starts out by saying, “A new breed of image-manager is emerging in the United States to take on the masked and hooded cybermobs who, bolstered by anonymity and weak laws, launch damaging attacks on other web users.”
Sounds like you are on to something with this post. Apparently, reputation managers are needed to in the fight against cybermobsters.
Like Whyte, I am curious about the effectiveness of online
reputation services. Can they really purport to neutralize negative
customer response?
Wondering how these differing companies
claim to rewrite web history, I searched their sites to see if they
explained their process.
Brandseye - claims to be able to
compare your co. against your competitors in it's "unique"
search-filter quantification program.
Buzzmonitor- an aggregator
developed by the World Bank and released as open source to crawl the
web and (so true to it's name) monitor buzz about your co.
MyReputation
- works only for individuals and doesn't really divulge how they
"destroy" unpleasant remarks about you on the web.
Trackur - is in Beta mode. Looks as if it's attempting to be a more affordable option.
Umbria
- in addition to filtering out what nasty things bloggers are saying
about you, this company offers suggestions at how best to curb your
company image based on current blogging trends.
Brand
intelligence - finds the bad guys talking smack about your company and
shuts them up. The difference here is that you can get updates in a
monthly report or on 24hour patrol.
Reputation Monitor - tracks your company's online profile, let's you fight back.
Most
of them seem to use spidering software to crawl the web and discover
bad news spreading about your company. But as a previous IE post
pointed out,- one of the best things to happen to Dell, was the blog
"Dell Hell", as it forced the company to restructure it's service
sector.
How many companies do you think will start using these sites? Do you
think PR and strategic communications firms will all start using spider
software to monitor product feedback?
For some class of product, reputation/buzz IS the product. I remember a story from the 'broadcast' era, of a talentless messenger boy and his teen girlfriend who disguised their voice and called LA radio stations to play "That I Got You" song. Music, fashion, many things are all perception and keeping perception good is product improvement.
Thanks for your response. I think with the increasing size of the internet and the speed with which information travels, online reputation would be a constant challenge for businesses and individuals. I think we should be prepared that we are in for the long haul and it's discouraging to learn that businesses do give up on it quickly:
My concern now is the effectiveness of online reputation softwares. As a more and more businesses and individuals seek to manage their reputaions online, we will see the proliferation of softwares that purports to do the work for us easily. I saw this list of online reputation management software and would like you comment on their usefulness and if possibly give your reccommendation:List of Online Reputation Management Software
Your interesting post reminds me of an article that I read in the Times a few months ago, about the problems many small business owners have with their online reputation management. As illustrated in this article, local entrepreneurs often lack the know-how and the resources to counter attack negative campaigns against their product or service. What do you think would be the most economic and efficient strategy for these small business owners to manage their reputation? To what extent would it be different from MRO?
Also, I'd like to bring up a topic that James also touches upon: 'unjust' reputation disasters. The aforementioned article in NYT mentions this as well: cases of online slander by individuals (or even corporate entities) out to destroy one's good name, regardless. Now of course, slander is not something that is exclusive to the internet, and our legal system includes appropriate penalties against it. I do think however that slander spreads a lot faster online than it does in real life. The MRO strategy is pretty pro-active, but would additional measures be needed to fight online slander?
I think transparency is king these days - especially when it comes to
reputation management! So if a company truly has an issue with their product of
services why not own up to it and commit to fixing it.
Example here is Dell when their laptop batteries caught fire. Once they got
in gear and started responding to bloggers the very tone of the communications
about the problem changed. Bloggers became more respectful when they knew Dell
was listening. Then they owned up to the problem, committed to fixing it and committed
to making the customer whole in the process.
Surely there will be companies that try to "game" the system to the advantage
of their reputation but I believe the right way is taking the high road to repairing your reputation.
Your article points out the benefits of reputation management, but I was hoping that you would respond to some potential pitfalls in this strategy.
I came across an example of how the manipulation of a search engine optimization can be used to help a company manage their reputation online. Let’s say there's a Web site that is presenting inaccurate content and misinformation about another company. Most firms can produce enough good content with various keyword phrases that will rank highly in the search engines to help push the bad site out of the top positions.
That's an effective way for a company to leverage search engines to respond to innacurate information. But what if the bad publicity or terrible product review was actually true about a company.
Isn’t there a downside when companies focus on manipulation of perception rather than on development and improvement of products and services?
I appreciate your comment and the link to the story on 2008 The year of Reputation Management.
I feel with the explosion of Social Networks that the prediction of 2008 being the year of the reputation has to come true. How many new social networks did we see enter the field last year? Countless. And it led to this acronym YASN - Yet Another Social Network.
The average person went from just subscribing to say LinkedIn to subscribing to Facebook and Plaxo which is a 200% improvement in the amount of Social Networking they may be doing.
I think we've all come to the stark reality of how powerfully the internet can be in disseminating information and generating public opinion( just ask the CIA on the Abu Graib incident). The companies are also beginning to face the issue of reputation management very seriously and infact one columnist predicted that 2008 will be the year when it will finally take greater momentum: 2008: the year of reputation management
As the old adage goes"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches" and so only fools will ignore what is at stake in this information age. Rather than going through the litigation way or be on the defensive always, your approach offers an effective pro-active strategy to deal with the issue. This should not only be limited to enterprises but also to individuals and non-profit making organizations. With recruiting agencies now surfing the web for information on potential employees, it becomes really a priority on our parts to keep abreast with our online reputations.
A passive approach would do us no good and this is how some organizations especially religious ones have basically responded to this issue of reputation management. It's high time these people rise up from their passivity, face the truth and engage people in a positive way on the internet.Gone are the days of saying the internet is full of lies and filth but rather use it to engage people in a positive and progressive way.
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