Your reputation is all you have
Your brand is not in your hands anymore – it’s an unpalatable truth for many businesses, but it is the new reality of the information age.
Once businesses get over the shock of the new they will start to see it as an opportunity… but many would probably rather go back to the pre-internet days when you had control of the message you gave to your customers.
Everyone is a critic
If you wanted to find out what your customers thought about your brand you would conduct some market research or tap into the local grape vine. It was all pretty straightforward.
But these days your brand is also in the hands of people who talk about you online, and they might not even be your customers. The democratisation of media with tools like Blogger, WordPress and Twitter has meant anyone can find or create an audience.
What this means is that the clippings agency you are paying to tell you what is being said about your company might be missing damaging material – particularly when you remember people are more likely trust other people like them than they are the newspapers.
Do your media people report back to you on negative reviews posted at ReviewCentre or Qype?
Listen up
In pre-internet days you had the luxury of time to solicit feedback, but now damaging content can trash your reputation in a matter of hours.
Scary, huh? Not necessarily.
There is a burgeoning market for sophisticated software to track your reputation right across the web. Some of the systems are better than others, but what they are all promising is almost real-time tracking of the mentions of your brand. That’s a great start for reputation protection.
Why might it be useful to watch what people are saying? As a company you may not want a Twitter strategy or have time or staff to constantly update your blog, but it is important to look at what is being said in the wild.
Imagine the value of early detection of problems with your customer service or products. Or being able to harness the wisdom in the feedback of hundreds, even thousands, of customers.
Ignorance was bliss…
There is much more to recommend reputation monitoring than a defensive stance against scandal.
Today’s business is very different from 20 years ago when I worked in my parent’s bike shop. We prided ourselves on our customer service, did an occasional advertising campaign and made sure to be present at local bike events.
We were happily ignorant of when people were talking about the shop (either good or bad) and as long as the people came at Christmas time to get their kids a bike or came back to us if they wanted an upgrade or needed a service we were happy.
Customers today have a wider and stronger voice than ever before – think how often you’ve had a 45 minute wait to speak to a call centre and then failed to have your problem fixed. Now imagine you several thousand people following you on Twitter and you decide to start badmouthing company X….
People are going online to complain when they have a bad experience, and it’s not unreasonable when you remember they are helping to pay your wages.
The warm fuzzies
But it’s not just customers you need to worry about. What about the things your staff are saying or doing?
Someone in your own business could play an ill-advised prank that spirals out of control like Domino’s Pizza where the brand suffered serious repercussions within 24 hours from a video posted to YouTube.
By monitoring your brand online you can see what people are saying about you – and believe it or not, the talk is not always negative. It can leave you feeling warm inside to see your business getting a virtual pat on the back.
Have you had any experiences with online reputation management? How did you find out what was being said?
What do you think?
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