5 Ways to Bulletproof Your Reputation in 2020

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” - Jeff Bezos

And for good reason. More than three-quarters of a brand’s market value—75% or more—is attributed to its reputation.

Over the past 5 years, the communications landscape has evolved at breakneck speed. Brands are faced with a new paradigm of reputation management, one that requires a data-driven and strategic approach to achieve business outcomes. Here are 5 points to consider:

1.     Arm yourself with actionable data

There have been tectonic shifts in the appreciation and usage of data. Before the rise of analytics, communications professionals often had to fly blind, relying on estimation-based feedback mechanisms to evaluate the effectiveness of their communications efforts.

However, with increased availability of tech tools to obtain accurate data in real-time, brands are now presented with the opportunity to monitor and control their narrative for higher impact. Several brands, such as Dell, Cisco and KLM, have developed social command centres to act as a hub where they can collect, analyse and act on relevant conversations.

Take Nestlé for example. With over 210 million Facebook fans, and more than 2,000 brand profiles across different product categories, markets, and time zones, the FMCG leader has an enormous amount of primary data to draw insights from – but how best to do it? The answer was through a social media command centre.

The command centre is equipped with a range of screens, displays the most popular mentions of the brand in real time, while yet other dashboards identify the top 20 issues — both positive and negative — currently affecting the brand.

Through real-time data analytics, Nestlé gets a clear view of their brand sentiment, monitors discussions taking place across digital media channels and engages with their audience—giving them the opportunity to leverage opportunities or prevent potential reputational issues.

Digital command centres have become an effective way for brands to shape their narrative and engage with impact in real time. From stakeholder mapping and audience insights to sentiment analysis and impact assessments, data will help optimize strategies to be relevant, current, specific, better targeted and increasingly personalized. 

2.     Take a bird’s eye view of reputation risks

A negative incident that goes viral via social and digital channels can cause carnage to a business, and the resulting reputational damage can be considerable. You probably have read about the incident at a Starbucks outlet led to hundreds of negative reviews, transforming the perception of the entire brand. The crisis is a stark reminder of just how quickly a company’s carefully cultivated culture can be called into question due to an isolated incident and just how rapidly word can spread in the social media realm.

Remember the Dell crisis in 2005? A scathing blog post launched a massive fleet of like-minded complaints about the brand’s products and service. Dell was not ready, and the damage took its toll, from poor customer service scores to declines in market share and profits.

It took a year before Dell decided to be radically transparent. They started monitoring conversations on digital channels and engaging with their customers. The results raised their stock price to a steady $25, improving brand trust significantly.

Perception is everything. In a world where people are increasingly putting their money behind brands that mirror their values, a brand’s reputation translates directly to business outcomes by way of engagement, increased revenue or referrals. 

3.     Explore digital influencers storytelling

Micro-influencers are fast becoming part of a brand’s communication strategy.

Micro-influencers drive 60% higher campaign engagement rates than macro-influencers. – Ad Week

Brands are now more willing to have their actions supported by collaborating with online influencers. The reason for this is simple—it’s effective. Consumers see influencers as their peers, and it is our peers and friends who we trust more than any brand. We value the opinions of such “friends” when making our own purchasing decisions, which is an enormous advantage for brands.

4.     Keep up the frequency

Here’s a fact: The average informed person today has five daily sources of information and needs to see a message or story five to eight times to believe it. Repetition of messages across digital media channels including social media reinforce communications, ensuring message retention and subsequent building of reputation.

Driven by changing demographics, and the ubiquity of mobile technology, the role of social media is expanding. Brands are discovering how external social media channels are sometimes more effective employee communications vehicles than their own internal platforms. Video-rich platforms such as YouTube and Instagram are growing exponentially as video content becomes the competitive edge for brands.

5.     What gets measured gets improved

Are your messages really getting traction from your core audience? How does your corporate communications strategy impact your brand’s market value?

The best communication teams are thinking ahead. By collecting accurate data and monitoring meaningful metrics, they are laying the groundwork for connecting the impact of their communication efforts to organizational outcomes.

Sentiment measuring tools will allow you to finetune your communication tactics and answer the hard questions from your stakeholders.

Hold the winning hand

The stakes for communications strategists in the digital age are higher—their success or failure can make or break a brand’s reputation. It is then crucial to accept that the sheer speed at which technological innovations advance will require us to make data the first and last stop of any strategy development and deployment.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” - Warren Buffett