Taking Charge of your Online Reputation
Date:
25 Nov 2010 Whether you choose to engage with them or not, your customers are discussing your company and brand online. You can’t stop the conversations you don’t like but you can influence them to the benefit of your brand.
If you have any doubt about the influence of social media in South Africa, just consider the storm that broke out after Woolworths announced that it would withdraw religious magazines from its shelves.
The retailer offered the media an ambiguous explanation for a commercial decision to remove these product lines from its stores. A backlash that started as a few angry posts on Facebook and Twitter soon turned into a PR crisis. From social media, the story spread like wildfire to the mainstream media. Faced with the prospect of a boycott by Christian customers, Woolworths was forced to recant its decision.
What we can take from this case study is the lesson that things customers say and read on social media websites can impact businesses in the real world. You can try and close your eyes to what people are saying about your brand online, or you can try and engage with and influence them.
It’s time to listen
This is where the discipline of online reputation management (ORM) comes into play. This is a process of listening to what your customers are saying about you online, monitoring and analysing these conservations, and then engaging with customers by taking part in the conversation.
It starts with the recognition that everyone who is connected to the Internet has a voice. Your company, its brands and its products are constantly being discussed on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, consumer activist sites and more.
Some of the online voices are more influential than others, but nearly all of them reach someone who might want to buy a product or service from your company at some stage.
ORM is the way you try to listen to their concerns, engage with them and then measure your success in improving your online reputation.
It differs dramatically from traditional reputation management in the sheer volume of people you’ll be interacting with, in the level of automation it offers and in the way it demands you converse with customers rather than engaging in a monologue.
Automated reputation management
There are a host of powerful tools that will facilitate ORM for you. A good set of applications will provide a real-time platform for monitoring, measuring and engaging in conversations online.
Data could be displayed in a dashboard that is updated in real-time. From this dashboard, you’ll be able to track the most important conservations and take part in them. You should also be able to measure the impact of your interventions so that you can keep refining your strategies and tactics.
But even if you have the right tools in place, you will need to ensure you have the right resources to manage them. A lot of South African companies give the task of ORM to a customer service or marketing person without realising how much of a drain on that person’s time it can become.
But it’s a process that cuts across your whole organisation – from logistics and customer service to sales and marketing. Make sure you can coordinate responses across your organisation, whoever is responsible for ORM and social media.
ORM – what is it good for?
So, what is the point of introducing these tools into your business? You can start off using ORM in a tactical manner. For example, you can use it to act quickly on customer service complaints, nip online rumours in the bud and to address malicious or inaccurate information that is spreading across the Web.
As Woolworths discovered, it can take a matter of a few hours for the combination of a misunderstanding, an angry customer and a few blog or Facebook posts to go viral and grow into a full-blown crisis. By keeping your ear to the ground, you can respond fast enough to stop a small issue from growing into a massive reputational problem.
But the real power of ORM comes from using it as a truly strategic tool to improve customer relations with and perceptions of your company. For that reason, you should align ORM with the way you manage your brand reputation offline. You can, for example, use it as one of the most powerful real-time research tools you could ever hope to find. You can tap into hundreds or thousands of consumer conversations that will give you invaluable insights into your customers.
You can measure sentiment and buzz about your brand or a newly released product by listening in on the online conversation. You can find out what customers honestly like and don’t like about your products and services, what they really think about your competitors, and what really matters to them.
You should, if you are going to be strategic about ORM, set clear goals and benchmarks for yourself. Do you want to create positive buzz about your brand? Reach more influential people? Combat negative perceptions? You must set clear objectives and measure yourself against them.
Closing words
ORM will form an important part of the reputation and brand management mix in nearly every company. If your customers are online, you should be listening to what they’re saying and responding to the conversation in a way that enhances your reputation and your brand.
