The Reputation Management Blog

Are you the only person in the world with your name? Probably not. We work too hard maintaining our reputations to fall victim to someone else’s mistakes. This can happen if someone with the same name as you or your company is involved in a scandal or some type of negative publicity. The reputational downfall associated with their name can affect you since you share the same name and, as a result, the same search results.

Sometimes the actions that other people take can affect your own reputation in a very serious way.

• What do you do when someone with the same name as you is involved in a scandal?
• How do you distinguish yourself if you have a very common name?
• What tools can you use to monitor what is being said about your name online?

People will compare your brand with that of your competitors long before they contact you. Sentiment analysis allows you to track the opinions that people are expressing about your brand online, whether they are positive, negative, or neutral. Sentiment monitoring and analysis tools and techniques will give you a solid understanding of the status of your reputation online and help you to target your own content plan to either improve negative sentiment or to reinforce positive sentiment.

Think about the last time you bought something online. How did you decide what to buy? You probably searched for whatever you wanted and read a few reviews. Maybe you found a negative review and that was your cue to move on to the next option.

Just like we measure the revenue and turnover rates for a business, its corporate reputation is equally as important, yet more difficult to measure. Despite our inability to precisely “calculate” corporate reputation, the future of your business relies on your ability to keep it in good standing.

Every additional 1-star improvement can increase business 9%. Think about that. 

Whether you own a coffee shop or an auto body repair, chances are one of your main sources of business is from your Yelp page. By this point, you’ve surely put the time and effort into making your profile stand out from the rest of the crowd.

However, the work doesn’t end there. You must continue to manage your Yelp reviews to make sure the right people are leaving reviews, the positive reviews outnumber the negative, and that any issues are being addressed.

Corporate reputation refers to people’s collective opinion regarding a corporation or enterprise. It’s based on such features such as search engine results, news coverage, and the publicized actions of the company. There are there some corporate reputation humdingers out there. The news media loves a sizzling story of a corporation’s fall from grace and with good reason. The public is receptive, clicks ensue, money is made. This is because the human brain seems wired to generate copious amounts of curiosity when the topic is salacious or negative.

Corporate sentiment, or business sentiment, is how people feel about your brand. In more technical terms, it’s the level of confidence that shareholders have in a corporation or business—the prevailing mood or attitude about that company’s success (or lack thereof).

Reputation management is the effort to influence what and how people think of a brand or person when viewed online. Put another way, character is who you are. Reputation is whom other people think you are, and today it's based mainly on what artificial intelligence systems portray about you rather than the first-person experience.

Your company has fallen from grace. Maybe your CEO was arrested for fraud. Maybe E. coli was found in your food and made your restaurant customers sick. Or maybe you’ve just made some ill-advised business decisions over time, and it’s finally caught up with you.

A reputation crisis can happen unexpectedly, and can be a difficult thing to overcome, but it is possible to repair your reputation. Although a damaged corporate reputation may seem impossible to reverse, the journey to rebuild it can be summarized in a few key steps:

• Take control of your brand's online presence
• Know and monitor what is said about you online
• And, most importantly, apologize for any missteps

Today, it’s easier than ever before to spark misinformation, watch it spread, and then witness it take down corporations, crush reputations, and topple political figures.

A brief glance at the news tells you all you need to know. Fake news is powerful enough to shake technology juggernauts, crush world-famous personalities, and wipe entire businesses right off the map. And yet people still believe it.