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Posts Tagged ‘business reputation’
Our Malign World
August 11, 2009 | 
Author
Companies often focus their brand efforts on customers and potential customers, ignoring other potential stakeholders who can be equally vociferous in their criticisms.
Brand promises need to apply equally: consumers, employees, suppliers and business partners. In fact depending on your industry there could be many stakeholders to consider. If you are an oil company or mineral producer, local enviromental communities can have a major impact upon your reputation. Witness the recent connection between Shell and their operations in Nigeria.
If you have a product recall, consumers will complain, but a sacked employee or unpaid supplier can be even more vehement attacking your reputation.
The problem all companies face is that stakeholder access to channels for complaint is proliferating fast – blogs, forums, social networks, twitter, and personal web projects. In the past stakeholders had to engage with journalists and persuade news organisations to cover their story. Today, they publish and you are damned.
What can you do?
- Monitor
- Work on your management processes: if you always pay your suppliers late then you are simply inviting criticism. If you sack employees unfairly, they have every right to complain.
- Investigate complaints so you can demonstrate that you are serious about being a good organisation.
Forums can be a nightmare for reputation management
We had a case recently where a PR company decided to tackle some negative comments about a client on a popular negative forum. The backlash was immense and completely back fired.
Here are the main reasons for not tackling forums.
- Forums are traditionally places where people like to complain, the last thing they want is someone to defend the company, their attitude is you can put your positive info some where else.
- You can’t control the content on a 3rd party forum site so its really risky, any thread you begin will start out positive but will quickly attract negative content.
- Last but not least, the most important reason, by adding more content onto these types of sites you encourage Google to rank it higher. Especially if it attracts more people to attack the company and add even more content.
The PR companies intention was good, but you cannot apply the same methods you would use in publications (Traditional PR) to the Internet as you will get hammered.
Also sites like Wiki and Facebook can bite you if you are not careful and incorrectly set up.
Posted in Reputation Management | 
Tags: business reputation, company reputation, forums, negative content, Reputation Management | 
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