New Year's top resolution: Managing your online reputation!

Well, 2009 has arrived, along with the New Year's resolutions and the ever-present pundit predictions. Now that we're on the other side of the New Year, I thought I would share my thoughts on what I feel should be one of the companies' top priorities - and probably their number 1 resolution for this year: Efficiently managing their online reputation.

Every day, a blogger or forum member is discussing something important to your business, being your company’s brand, your key executives, your competitors or your industry. They may be hyping your company and building positive buzz for your products or criticizing your services, complaining to others about the poor quality of your customer service. When you think about it, companies aren't just potentially facing negative consumer buzz. Criminals are starting to blackmail corporations by threatening to attack their reputations online and competitors can also get online and cause trouble.

Managing online reputation is fast becoming a growing problem for businesses. With the rise of social media and user-generated content, online reputation is not just a matter of tracking influential blogs. Millions of people can alter the content of popular sites, anonymous people can post rumours on obscure chat sites and popular consumer rating sites. The Internet has quickly become a complex ecosystem where public opinion can be created and disseminated within seconds. Keeping your eyes and ears on the world of consumer generated media can be a daunting task for any company. Blogs, forums, wikis and social networks gain popularity every day and without a plan to monitor and manage your company’s online reputation, you could be at risk.

A business's reputation will be based on an almost infinite amount of information sources. The Internet is a huge database of unstructured information. When everyone is a publisher, the likelihood of libel increases a millionfold. Accountability has fallen by the wayside."
Toby Bell, Research Vice President at Gartner, Inc.

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious and managing your business’s online reputation is key to owning your brand. Many enterprises are only just starting to understand the importance of online reputation management. It is fast becoming critical for marketing and communication, legal counsel, corporate risk management and the line of business alike to really understand how to better monitor, manage and measure online reputation and to remedy problems faster when they occur. There are so many conversations out there that there is simply no effective manual way to identify them all, to figure out whether there is something to take action on, to react to or promote. Companies should therefore create policies and adopt technologies that can help analyse what is being said about them on the Internet and respond to conversations that can damage their reputations.

The proliferation of social media on the web empowers consumers to become influential, opinion-wielding publishers but also enables businesses to take the pulse of consumers as it pertains to their brands. There are a handful of vendors including Reputica, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Andiamo Systems, Market Sentinel or Visible Technologies to name a few, that offer services and technologies to help you monitor, protect, nurture and build a stellar reputation for your business. These solutions will help you gain a comprehensive understanding of what your customers are saying about your products & services, and proactively identify issues that have the potential to affect the reputation of your company, image or brand. You will be able to gain control of crisis situations with up-to-the-minute intelligence that helps you pinpoint the consumer state of mind on issues that can include product recalls, liability issues, consumer activism, negative publicity, corporate issues, news events, rumours or situations you never expected. Advanced monitoring, relevance detection, filtering, classification, sentiment & concept mining, modelling and scoring techniques as well as visualisation technologies will also enable you to leverage candid public conversations so you’re in the best possible position to repair your relationship with customers, stakeholders, regulators, the media, the public and other groups. 

But reputation management should not only be limited to large organisations. Companies of all sizes have competition and are experiencing the new reality of Internet-enabled consumers who are creating and sharing their experiences, opinion and content online. The MarketingPilgrim website published a great list of twenty six free "buzz tracking" tools that can be used to monitor your company reputation, track news that relate to your industry or even spy on your competition. As new social networks have gained increased importance, and new tools have come onto the scene, this recently updated list of 8 additional free social media monitoring tools is also well worth checking out.

To learn more about this topic, I encourage you to download the full copy of Risky Business: Reputations Online™, a white paper resulting from a worldwide online survey of senior executives conducted by Weber Shandwick in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). This excellent white paper addresses issues including the vulnerability of company reputation, the resources executives rely upon to assess company reputation, the identification and prioritization of online risks to reputation, the impact of traditional and new media on reputation, the globalization and localization of digital reputation, the penetration of Web 2.0, the threat of employee cyber-sabotage, and most importantly, the best measures for protecting a company’s online reputation.

Comments

[Mike Spataro]

Christian,

Great advice to start the new year. After all these Internet years, I'm still amazed at how many people don't pay attention to their online reputation. Thanks for the mention.

[Carter F Smith]

Good observations on the business approach to personal profiles. As we continue experiencing the momentum of the social media movement, we'll see more and more newbies coming aboard. I think we need to know how to talk to them, check out http://carterfsmith.blogspot.com/2008/01/translation-factors-be-more-like-lady.html

[Christian Smagg]

Dear Mike,

Thanks for your recent comment. I see that not only do you provide excellent online reputation management services, but you also apply best practices to your own brand!
Congratulations for being the first of the several solution providers I mentioned to react to my post.
Come on guys ... is there anybody out there? ;-)

[Renée Barrett]

Christian,

That was an excellent article! Additionally, it's not just businesses but also individuals that face this problem.

Most marketers are familiar with the 4 Ps of the marketing mix: product, price, place & promotion. Online social networking isn't that different.

Here we have become the product and now also must safeguard our unique brand identities. Online social networking (arguable a form of individual marketing) centers around 4 new Ps: privacy, persona, placement, and postings.

When you participating in sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Craigslist, Amazon or your own blog, individuals first need to consider these 4 Ps. They will improve the quality of your online social networking experience.

Privacy - Young or old, a certain degree of privacy is necessary. Employers, clients, big brother, and others are watching you online. Use settings on sites to control who sees what information, photos, & blogs.

Persona - Decide how professional you need to be and how much of your personal identity you are comfortable sharing with the world. You know the first w in WWW. Don't leave yourself vulnerable.

Placement - Time is the most precious and unrenewable resource we own. Who should get your online time? Will it be your friends, hobbies, career pursuits, or kindred spirits? Only you can decide what communities deserve your profile.

Postings - What should I say about myself and others? Will I speak my mind completely or censor myself. Will my words haunt me one day? Am I listing private contact details that jeopardize my personal safety? Metadata can be harder to remove than a tattoo. Think before you post, then edit.

A greater deal of strategy needs to be employed in the cyber world. Businesses and individuals that fail to make themselves aware of the best course of action will be held accountable by someone.

Sincerely,
Renée
AKA AAARenee

[Andrew Jordan]

Christian,

Firstly, thanks for the mention.

From our experiences in the field of online reputation management, the proliferation of data and its impact on reputation is not the end of the story, as any Comms Director will tell you. We are continually asked "so what ?" and it is here that the real effort should be applied. Understanding HOW data proliferates, and managing it accordingly is paramount to successful reputation management.

But I have to add that the story doesn't stop there either. Organisations are just as keen to understand how to manage their OWN data, and how THAT impacts their reputation which forms part of a much fuller picture than simply measuring publicly available sources. And, to a large extent, this requires a comprehensive data management policy as much as a monitoring tool, such as Reputica.

I must say though, that you are absolutely right that organisations in 2008 must wake up to this dimension of public relations. In the UK, the legislation is now explicit around Directors' responsibilities to competently manage their corporate reputations. I'm sure many other jurisdictions will soon follow suit.

Regards,

Andrew

[Landinn]

Great article, it really shows serious attention to many of the realities (positive and negative) of our increasingly online society.

As a recruiter, author, and active blogger, it reinforces many of my current practices and provides food for thought in other areas.

[Kenneth Schlenker]

This is a great article to understand the challenges around managing online reputation.
Let me suggest that efficiently managing online reputation should not only be number 1 resolution for companies, but also for successful managers.
Many of the themes you touch upon around corporate reputation rely on the capacity of individual managers to use the mechanisms of online reputation.
As part of a study on web 2.0 applied to management education, I have developed the idea that "learners 2.0" can add value to organizations because they have learned through experience how online reputation and authority functions : http://kschlenker.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/learning-20/

[John Hingley]

Hi Christian,

Spot-on article, and I definitely agree that social media analysis, word of mouth measurement, brand reputation monitoring or however people refer to it is important for companies of all sizes.

It could be argued that smaller companies can potentially suffer much more business risk due to negative opinions being posted online; they simply don't have the resources to counteract the damage. But by listening and acting on potentially negative comments, they show that they do listen and care about consumer opinions. This also acts to diffuse the issues and can actually help turn detractors into brand promoters - anytime you take action to right a wrong, you build loyalty.

We are geared toward the SMB market, and provide a risk-free 14 day free trial.

Cheers
jwh