Why Your Company’s Online Reputation Matters
As a discipline, reputation management is still nascent. Caught up in the uniting cry to go digital, several brands are keen to perform in search results, but they are somewhat less attentive towards the realities of what precisely consumers see.
To the point that some brands in the region do exercise reputation management, most consign it to a single person or department, such as digital marketing, customer service, or human resources. While engaging in any kind of reputation management is a great start, it should not be classified into a particular box on the organizational chart. Reputation management should be a companywide accountability that influences several, if not all, external-facing departments.
First Impressions Go Digital
When a stakeholder hears about your business for the first time — be it a potential customer, employee, partner, or investor — they will always Google your business to learn more. What they see in the search results is really their first impression, except it’s even heftier than the first impressions we make as businesspeople at meetings, events, or conferences.
Unlike in-person meetings, where you can offset an initially bad first impression as you share more about yourself over the course of a conversation, there are no such opportunities online. Stakeholders who are put off by a negative employee review or a critical feature from a journalist when searching your brand will not give you a chance to explain yourself. They’ll simply click away from your site. Our attention spans online last a couple seconds at most, and you just wasted the few that someone gave you.
Wrong perception on the internet can fester growth and instantly compromise sales and marketing endeavours. It can also scare away an investor or cause the potential candidate to relate to a competitor. Despite the significance of reputation management, the only way for employees to understand its implication is to get it from the top down. Company leaders must communicate the importance of reputation management and operationalize it into a key performance indicator.
Each department should be assigned relevant channels for reputation management. For example, human resources can monitor Glassdoor and LinkedIn; digital marketing can keep an eye on Facebook, Twitter, and Google; and public relations can watch media outlets. The responsible departments must report on their assigned channels. The sharing of such vital information is a constant reminder that everyone must work together to build, improve and protect their brand’s online reputation. A key point to note here is that companies often fail because they don’t consult experts.
In stimulating the whole organization to practice reputation management, leaders must highlight a proactive rather than reactive approach. The latter is all too common, particularly in Asia. Brands will only take action around their reputation crisis or when a dissenting view appears online. Only then will they spring to action, summoning whatever resources they can to retort to the critical view, bury it among more positive content, or work to remove the disapproval if libellous or otherwise erroneous.
Rather than just replying to online issues as they ascend, brands must be practical, beginning with developing an inclusive online branding: What is it that they want to be known for? Determining a company’s messaging is just as important for reputation management as it is for public relations or any other communications function. Skipping this step — as many enterprises do in their rush to respond to rebellious online voices — also leads to poor branding and consequent performance. Your business will come across as just another entity in a business world keen to sustain appearances rather than an organization responding` from a place of honest authenticity.
The messaging that you create for your reputation management should be considered a living document. Your business should evaluate how its mission, vision, and values are imitated on the internet every quarter, or even more often if your business is experiencing rapid growth. Done properly, proactive online reputation management company will create an online brand that all of your team members will be proud of.
