Reputation management is a vital consideration for any business of any size but becomes particularly important for businesses and brands that break the meniscus into the bigger leagues.
Reputational challenges can appear from different directions, whether in relation to data leaks or poor public perception of business decisions – and businesses today are uniquely unprepared to meet these challenges.
What are some proactive ways you can address brand reputation management for your own business?
Protect Privacy
For starters, your business should be airtight when it comes to press, information, and privacy in general. Leaks of any kind can be massively detrimental to your business’ reputation, from internal documentation hinting at layoffs or restructuring to private and confidential employee/customer data. Depending on the nature and content of the leak, your reputation could be harmed in a number of different ways.
You should have an employee handbook and code of conduct for all staff members, detailing all compliance requirements expected of them.
Given the wide variety of ways in which leaked information can be damaging to your business, your approach to privacy should be similarly wide-ranging. Employees should be trained in cyber-security, to reduce the risk of losing internal or private data to phishing scams.
Whistleblowing schemes should also be put in place to enable anonymous reporting on colleagues who may be appropriating private information. Finally, VPNs, firewalls provide a final failsafe for potential breaches.
Manage Internal Company Culture
Just as the impact of external reporting or leakage can deeply affect your and your business’s reputation, so too can the company culture fostered within your business. Employee morale and job satisfaction are together key for the longevity of your business and its equitable growth in a difficult market.
On one level, poor job satisfaction can lead to a ‘brain drain’ over time, as your more talented staff become disincentivized to stay against better prospects elsewhere. On a more serious level, employees that do not feel especially connected to your business and its mission are more likely to commit a white-collar crime, impacting your business and potentially implicating others.
Whatever the risks, the responses to them start from the same place. Investing in your staff will ensure they feel valued, and that your business’ mission benefits their personal mission – minimising the number of associated risks and preserving your business reputation to boot.
Shape Digital Footprint
We’ve touched on the dangers of data egress from your business, and the importance of cultivating a positive culture within it – but what we haven’t discussed is the shape of your business’ footprint in the most essential of contemporary spaces: the internet. Your business’s digital footprint is instrumental to its brand perception, and should not be overlooked when working towards a positive business reputation.
Starting in this direction is as simple as ensuring your information is correct on Google; through Google’s My Business portal, you can ensure contact details, opening hours, and other information are correct. Thus guaranteeing potential customers or clients will not be disappointed. It also has reviews that can build consumer trust, and it’s important to control and respond to any negative comments.
You should also monitor your online presence, especially in branded searches. You should be dominating the top of the search results with your site, social media profiles, and other websites that give credibility. You can do this with products and services reviews with sites that have a high position in the search engines, and you can use your competitors for inspiration.
This is only step one in a much more complex journey, which goes to a future of active social media monitoring and story management in digital spaces. For this, a dedicated social media PR department would be nothing short of ideal. If not, there are plenty of public relations agencies that specialise in reputation repair and monitoring.
A Proactive Approach
You should align your reputation management strategy with your marketing and advertising teams, which ensures an easier time of reputation building in case of any crisis management or brand damage.
