What Are They Saying About You? How To Improve Your Brand’s Reputation
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it burned in one. Fun Fact: The Emperor at the time, Nero watched his city burn as he played the flute. You don’t want to pull a Nero, and fiddle around as your company goes through some hardships. While you currently may enjoy a company that is garnering nothing but rave reviews and booming social media presence, one incident can sink your reputation. A company’s reputation is how they are perceived by outside sources such as competing companies, the general public, and potential investors. Your reputation as a service provider, business partner or community brand are impacted by a variety of different factors. An online comment that says “this company is awful” could potentially outweigh the five “this company is good” comments to a potential audience, investor or partner. Negative experiences leave a lasting and far reaching impression on an undecided customer, partner or investor.
The problem with managing your reputation is you can’t control what people say about you. If you did you’d have a 100% approval rating. However, you can control how your reputation is shaped through a few methods.
Define a Corporate Image and Live By It
Now I’m saying you can’t do Casual Mondays, and Taco Tuesdays and immediately lose all the fun, unique things that make your company unique. However, you should present a corporate image to the public. There are three areas in which your company can create a corporate profile.
- Mission Statement: A mission statement defines your company’s’ goals, values and principles. A mission statement helps you figure what your moral obligations so you can avoid instances where hot topic issues might drive away customers. Your mission statement should also set a standard for consistent behavior from the CEO’s all the way to the interns.
- Media Relations: Think of media relations like filing those pesky taxes. There’s two tenets that apply to both: timeliness and integrity. Oh, and the feeling of relief when you do it right! Timeliness is important with taxes and media releases; you want to be proactive rather than reactive. It gives the public the impression that you have it all under control and you able to weather a storm. Integrity, aka “yes white lies are still lies,” have the most direct relationship to your reputation. Being able to not only conduct yourself in a professional and ethical way not only assured that customers want to conduct business with you but that potential investor will want to do business with you.
Encourage satisfied customers to post online reviews:
Time to introduce the praise-to-criticism ratio. Harvard Business Review finds that five positive comments outweigh one negative comment. 5:1, for the mathematically inclined crowd. If the folks at Harvard are saying that, it must be true. Nonetheless, user feedback is the best way to gauge how the public perceives you.It also acts an active endorsement to forum lurkers and intrigued web surfers. It’s important to encourage satisfied customers to engage with you on social media, post reviews online or even, send recommendations to friends. Each positive engagement can overwhelm, or hopefully bury that one negative Nancy that’s in the comment section.
Know how to navigate through negative situations: No one bats 1.000, but that doesn’t mean you should get into a slump. If you happen to face a PR disaster, it’s important to live by the acronym C.A.L.M.
C. Counter any negative press, with either a public apology, statement and allow yourself to be active rather than passive. Passivity will hurt your company as your lack of action can allow you to be used as a punching bag from angry customers and opportunistic competitors.
A. Assess the damage. Are you losing partners? Have deals fallen through as a side effect? It’s best to get together with you team and do damage control and figure out how to prevent current and future damage.
L. Listen to what is being said. You can’t fix what’s wrong if you don’t know what’s wrong. Take a time to hear the complaints; often times you’ll find that upset consumers just want to feel like their pleas are being heard.
M. Move on. That being said, dwelling on a negative situation will only lower morale and create a sense of self-doubt in your decision makers. The best way to help fight back against backlash is to perform better and force the bad experience out of the general public’s memory.
Establish and secure partnerships:
Friends are fun, right? I have friends, and a good friend will do their best to make sure you both succeed. Developing partnership, especially mutually beneficial alliances can help improve your reputation. A partnership shows the public that you’re profitable, reliable and credible. The key to partnerships and alliances are there’s a shared accountability that takes place–everyone has a stake in this agreement and underperforming can cause damage to all parties involved. That’s where securing your partnerships come into play. A sour partnership can create a “persona non-grata” cloud over your company’s head ruining any chances of being a strong brand. To avoid messy corporate breakups, act in the interest of you and your partners and reward their trust in your brand by performing strong.
You’re not the only one’s who care about your reputation, we do too!
About Author:
Robbie Sequeira is the Associate Editor at Newswire.com, with a Journalism degree from Franklin Pierce University. He has written articles for numerous print and online publications, and also started his own sports media organization Raven Sports Network. He is an avid sports fan with allegiances to the Yankees, Knicks and Jets.
