It is essential to manage your reputation these days because business and public dealings depend on your reputation in the market. Reputation is nothing but how your attitude & image is perceived. The problem with the digital world is that a simple google search about your name or your organization’s name can reveal a lot about you. Having negative results on the web can be catastrophic for your reputation and your image. There are chances that people would not end up doing business with you in such a case.
A simple new article or a blog post about you can damage your reputation severely. As Warren Buffet quoted, it takes a lifetime to build your reputation, but it takes just a few minutes to ruin your reputation. In such a case, you should take the reviews on the web and other things very seriously. Often, a single bad review can damage your business. Customers may lose interest in your products, and they would start looking for a replacement for that product. Apart from this, the stakes are even higher for celebrities and public figures.
All the influencers and public figures need to stay updated about their reputation and what is posted on the web. Reputational risk for such public figures is also directly related to revenue and their popularity. We hope that you understand the reputational risk now, but how can you manage this risk? In the next couple of points, we have listed the ways you can manage the reputational risk.
How to manage Reputational Risk?
We will talk about some of the points that can help you manage the reputational risk. Go ahead and check out these points below.
- Strategize & Plan – One of the crucial things here is to ensure that you are strategizing the reputational risk management process as a part of operations & marketing. You need to have a strategy on how you can manage the reputational risk at the organizational level. There should be a proper redressal system as this helps you in managing the customers & complaints.
- Stakeholder Expectations – One of the main reason for getting customer complaints is the difference between the expectations of the customer and the level of service. This creates dissatisfaction and does not make false promises to the customer. Understand what the customer expects, set the expectations right and ensure that you are delivering based on the customer expectation. This helps in managing the reputation of your brand.
- Action & Reaction – We always believe that the approach should not be based on action and reaction. You need to follow an approach where you are proactively working for the welfare of your followers or customers. Reacting only to a stimulus may not prove to be a fruitful approach.
- Positive Communication & Image Building – Positive communication is quite an important part of managing reputational risk. You need to have positive communication with the customers, and participating in constructive discussions also help. All these things can also be managed by blog posts. You can engage in these activities, and it certainly enables you to build a reputation and manage it simultaneously.
- Reputation Management Firm – All the steps that we have listed above may sound difficult to you, especially if you have no experience. In such a case, you can hire a reputation management organization to do all these tasks for you. These organizations can manage your image on social media, which works very well for most of them. Since these consultancies are experienced, it is a sure shot win for you.
Crisis Management – Now, the fact is that things will go wrong during the lifetime of the organization. Having a crisis management plan can help you in reducing the damage. So, you can develop one such plan and deploy it as soon as a crisis arises.