- Twitter to lose its reputation as a free speech platform?
- IIPM worried about Google Suggest, why is it so?
- Reputation Management Tip for 2012: Brands need to tap into social media search!
- Facebook Timeline and Reputation Management
- Apple Siri gender bias or glitch?
- Google+ vs Facebook – its not over yet!
- The Ethics of Self Promotion Through Charitable Causes (A Case Study)
- Google scraps sidewiki – will you miss it?
- Facebook, the trust factor
- BlackBerry Blackout- RIM’s Reputation Takes another Hit
Posts Tagged ‘HR’
Reputation Management and HR
June 26, 2010 | 
Author Does HR (Human Resource) play an effective role to strengthen your reputation? This has been a long debated topic! Well, being the most essential and valued part of any business HR to a large extent plays an active role in shaping the reputation of your firm. HR represents the company’s reputation internally which is most valued and includes answers to what the employees feels for the company, or do they seek a role in the firm, etc. It may seem a passive factor, but it’s a most vulnerable area, where most companies falter.
Building up a good PR and reputation internally in the company reduces more than half the chances for a firm to risk its reputation.
Monitoring the internal reputation is something which most of the companies overlook; HR needs to analyze the feedback from the employees. To act unaware increases the probability for the company to earn a bad name from its own employees, this further spreads like a virus, damaging the bonhomie. To have an effective HR department reduces the risk of such internal unrest and keeps the company’s reputation protected from any employee criticisms in social networks.
Social media too develops a strong link among employees and the company, bringing in a blog or message board helps to know what the employees are looking for or facing or lacking, and gives the company the space to restructure its plans accordingly. Employees’ interest account most for any firm to stand strong, and if the employees lose trust from the firm then nothing can be done. With over 1 billion blogs and other social networking sites it’s really easy to get a bad name, and when such negative stuff comes out from your own employees’ mouth then the damage is even worse.
Reduce the risk of a bad image for your business and keep your reputation high with happy employees and their positive image of the company with effective Human Resource Management.
Posted in Company Reputation, Damage Limitation, Online PR, PR / Public Relations, Reputation Management, Reputation Online | 
Tags: Bad Press, Business, Business process outsourcing, Business/Finance, Company reputation management, Employment, HR, Human resource management, Human resources, Labor, management, Online Reputation Management, reputation, Reputation Management, Social Media Ventures Inc, Social Networks, Society | 
1 Comment »
Business – Do you understand Reputation Management
What would you do if a customer was standing outside your business front door shouting negative things?
There are certain types of industries that seem more prone to getting negative comments and competitors playing dirty tricks and trying to trash their company’s reputation. Here are some of the main industries our clients come from recently:
- Recruitment and HR
- Construction and building
- Celebrities
- Travel agents / hotels and other accommodation types
- Dating websites
I used to hear business owners talk about the Internet and not really understand it, back then companies just missed out on another great sales channel. Today, however, I have to say when I hear a business owner having the same attitude I have to hold back from calling them crazy and telling them they will be out of business in 5 years.
Why do I feel so passionate about this, well in the past when you played ignorant to the Internet you were just loosing possible sales, but now people and competitors could be killing your business by trashing your reputation online. Never has it been more important to take SEO and Online PR more serious, as a business owner you may not use the Internet much, but I am sure as hell your customers do. You may not only be missing sales but loosing them when customers Google your company and see negative feedback and unhappy customer experiences.
If you had someone standing outside your business’s front door saying “your company was a scam, sold terrible products, had terrible customer services” then what would you do? I am sure you would do something rather than ignore them, well the same thing could be happening online right now.
Every company now needs to take reputation management serious and not wait until negative comments and results appear on the first page of the search engines. Businesses need a to have in place a proper procedure for complaints and feedback. Monitoring or having a company like Reputation Management For defending your reputation online could prove invaluable.
Posted in Hotel Reputation, HR Reputation, Reputation Management, Reviews & Quality, SEO | Tags: construction, Hotels, HR, recruitment, Reputation Management | No Comments »
Managing your online reputation – why and who with?
A lot of businesses sit in a tricky space when it comes to their brand reputation, and no where is it more vulnerable than in the online space. Now that this area has become the mainstream for brand engagement, promotion and peer to peer advocacy it really presents a difficult issue, especially if you have a brand that serves tow distinct audiences slightly differently.
Take Totaljobs.com for example, as the most highly visited commercial recruitment and career site across the UK, we serve an audience of over 2.5 million users each month, and we engage with them at an often difficult and stressful time of their lives, as they are job seeking, so our brand needs to be helpful, empowering and provide a ease with which to cut through the confusion of finding a new job. This done well, with supportive advice like our CareerDoctor service ( http://blog.totaljobs.com/), and a secure environment in which personal and professional details can be stored and searched and market leading jobseeker tools (Instant Job match, Location Proximity Search, Suggested Synonym Matching), can give the support and confidence for our users to find their next job, and as we all know happy people are our best advocates.
We also serve a huge audience of recruiters, of all sizes, and their needs are for a brand and service that can provide highly targetable, responsive groups of job seekers using simple recruiter tools such as Keyshots (targeting the latest 500 people to register to Totaljobs within the set criteria of location and job role the recruiter sets) through to live interactive chat forums such as GradU8.com. Again, this done well leads to enhanced brand value across a powerful set of voices in our market.
But what about the people who can’t find what they are looking for, or don’t feel the user experience or service they receive is valuable? Naturally, when serving such a wide and deep audience with two distinct needs, there will be people who feel this, and online provides them with plenty of opportunity to voice their displeasure, either publicly or privately. So, as a brand, what do we do in this situation? To be honest, it’s more about what you don’t do.
Getting involved in a public spat on or offline is never going to end well for a large brand, but at the same time you have to know what is being said, by whom, online. Once a rumour, a venting of dissatisfaction or damaging information gets out to the masses and goes viral it is next to impossible to stop. Having control over the message is key and to have control over the message you must be able to see everything that is happening in real time. Tools such as Google Alerts can see everything that is being said about our company on social websites like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter to major news organizations such as BBC, Guardian and Sky News. The only way to have control is to be honest and transparent engage with the unsatisfied, but not in an ell encompassing public arena, you must have the channels for them to engage, question and seek clarity and advice, but you have to control the message in terms of forum and tone.
So, in ending, the internet has now become a very powerful and complex place that if managed right can be a great asset to a company such as Totaljobs.com, but if you do not have someone monitoring and being able to act with strategic actions then it can be a very dangerous place for you and your company. As newspapers decline and bloggers take over it may even become more vital to high profile individuals and companies. The question may well be how much people value their online brand? The answer right now? Probably more than the amount of resources they are willing to apply to managing it.
John Salt
Website Director
Posted in Examples, HR Reputation, Reputation Management, Reputation Online | Tags: Gradu8, HR, Reputation Online, Total Jobs, Totaljobs | No Comments »
How ex employee’s can bite back
The Internet is definitely another company HR and reputation headache, not only can unhappy customers talk about your business but also ex employees, look at this example for ZillionTV.
Ex employees can now fight a company on both sites, publicly and privately. If an employee feels they were wrongly done by and wants to take a company to tribunal, it’s easier and much cheaper for a company to just settle out of court regardless of whether the employee has a genuine reason or not for a tribunal.
Ex-employees can now attack a companies reputation on-line and if the are savvy enough with the Internet can get their negative remarks to rank highly if not higher than the actual companies website. So heed this warning make sure you have taken as many measures to protect yourself on-line, it maybe worth looking into the legality of contracts with employees to stop them positing confidential information. Although this will only go so far as it’s easy to post something anonymously, although this may change as the courts set more presidence.
Quite often we have to start on the company’s own website and improve how well it does for it’s own brand name and search terms, before we start the process of reputation management and burying negative results.
Posted in Company Reputation, Damage Limitation, Examples, Reputation Management, Reputation Online | Tags: HR, Rep, Reputation Management, Zillion TV | No Comments »
Does it matter what people say about you online?
By Nicola Ford, Head of Editorial, Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment (TMDR)
Consumer blogs, discussion forums and feedback ratings are just some of the opportunities the internet offers to consumers who want their voices to be heard. With as little as a 30-second registration process, disgruntled consumers can now have a serious impact on the reputations of previously almost impermeable corporate giants.
Online reputation management (ORM) is the process of protecting a brand, product or business across the internet – both limiting damage following negative press or public response, and also reinforcing and promoting existing corporate values.
The proliferation of user-generated content online means all organisations both private and public need to take ORM very seriously. And it’s big business, in 2008 the UK ORM industry was worth £60million (source: Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring Buyer’s Guide 2008, e-consultancy) – and as the internet continues to expand exponentially, so will the number of companies that need ORM.
Moreover, as companies continue to downsize to survive the recession, reputation management is increasingly important. If you don’t treat your exiting employees well, they might try to damage your reputation online, and your remaining employees might leave once the economy picks up. Companies need to safeguard their reputations for the future so they attract the best candidates to work for them.
But it’s not just organisations that need to worry about online reputation. With, on average, 80% of employers checking people online before interviewing them using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, candidates need to make sure their online ‘brand’ positions them correctly.
Most people take a reactive approach to their online brands only removing content they don’t want people to see. And although this is definitely part of it, it’s those people who are proactively building their online brands that will reap the biggest rewards – one of which is recruitment.
It’s estimated that 70% of all job opportunities are never advertised – in today’s tough market, jobseekers need to tap into this hidden job market and online networking is a great way of doing this. It’s not just making sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date – it’s about positioning yourself as a credible player in a particular field. There are a variety of methods to build up your online following: blogging, participating in discussion forums, Tweeting and so on.
A successful personal online brand does take time and effort to establish itself but the benefits can be great. By establishing a great online reputation for yourself, you should attract companies, professional contacts and friends with great reputations in return. And if that’s not enough to convince you, think of the alternative – competing with the majority of people for the 30% of job opportunities that are in the public domain…
And fortunately, there’s help available to make sure your online brand positions you as the sort of employee companies want to recruit. Services like Workthing which provides you with all the tools and advice you need to take a proactive approach to managing your reputation online.
Posted in HR Reputation, Reputation Management, Reputation Online | Tags: Blogs, forums, HR, Workthing | 4 Comments »