6 min read
Yes. Some PR agencies specialize in destruction rather than enhancement of reputation. Some of these agencies work for governments or political parties, others are private contractors, all have a similar agenda: Lay false trails, generate fake news, and use social media to weaken or decimate rivals by manipulating public opinion for nefarious purpose.
8 min read
Google is your new home page. When a brand dominates their own search engine results, it sends trust signals to prospective customers. Control of the many aspects of search results such as Knowledge Panel, carousel images, location information, Google posts, social media posts, and more not only provides brands with the ability to showcase why they're great, it also enables a company to keep competitors from sharing their online brand-space. This article discusses many of the ways brands can control how they're seen online.
10 min read
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.
11 min read
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).
13 min read
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:
12 min read
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.
8 min read
Your brand reputation is the single most crucial factor in the success of your company. An excellent reputation increases your customer loyalty, lead generation, and your competitive advantage. A bad one lowers your sales and makes people look at your business in a negative light.
12 min read
Here’s the deal. The media thinks your CEO screwed up. According to rumors, she siphoned the company’s quarterly earnings into a private yacht spending spree.
The truth? Your CEO is innocent.
But what does the media care about truth? They’re hanging onto the rumors like a toddler clutching a Snickers bar. The Internet’s news minions are intent on vilifying a corporate leader, weaving tales of oversized yachts funded with ill-gotten gain.
8 min read
Can you imagine how it felt to be the Chief Marketing Officer at Oxfam after their deputy CEO, Penny Lawrence, resigned because of a sex crimes scandal? If the first word that enters your mind is “stressed,” that’d be an understatement. A serious CEO scandal can mean the ruin of the reputation of an entire company, not just those at the top.
7 min read
It’s been a year of ups and downs in the world of reputation management, with a President who uses Twitter to communicate directly with the country, sexual harassment in Hollywood powerhouses and the fallout that followed, and professional athletes protesting during the National Anthem, this year has been a busy year for PR folks. Here is our list of the top 10 shared articles on the web that focused on reputation management. Have any additional ones to share? Let us know in the comments and we’ll update our list!
9 min read
The success or failure of your business can hinge on its online reviews.
From choosing the best hotels and restaurants in town to consulting the right doctors, most people rely on online reviews. Reviews are quickly replacing friend recommendations to become the main way we vet businesses against one another. In fact, we rely on online reviews so much that a single bad review can completely ruin the online reputation of a company.
A 2018 study suggests that 91% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations—as long as the reviews are authentic. But about 20% of reviews are fake. So can you really trust Yelp business reviews?
Using online reviews to help us make decisions has become so natural that we have started to do it without giving it a second thought. But why do we trust reviews so blindly? There are plenty of causes for concern when trusting online reviews.
This blog will share some of the most common types of review manipulation, and what you can look out for to become a more informed buyer. It's time to stop trusting reviews at face value and take a more critical stance when researching businesses online.
4 most common types of review manipulation:
5 min read
Of all the categories involved in managing a business’s online reputation, reputation repair is the one most fraught with confusion.
Humans hate criticism - founded or unfounded. Any sort of negativity directed toward your business—earned or otherwise—holds an immense power to inflict damage in both the present and the future. How you respond can either improve the situation or exacerbate it, and with the stakes so high, not many businesses can afford a misstep.
5 min read
Prospective customers compare the search profiles between competitors. New businesses normally don't have the level of search profile that mature companies do. That puts new companies at a disadvantage.
Reputation and reviews drive the success of businesses worldwide. Every month, approximately 543,000 new businesses open up. 70% of new businesses survive at least two years, half at least five years, and a third at least ten years. Just a quarter of all new businesses survive for 15 years or more.
14 min read
This relatively simple step-by-step inbound content plan will work for most small and medium-sized companies. While the schedule is weekly, it could very well be monthly. It's flexible to fit most time and budget constraints.
4 min read
If you’re musing about improving your online reputation, it might help to have an idea of the direction you’re going in. This brief guide can help you formulate a plan and take action.
5 min read
Brand touch points are like digital fingerprints; they tell a story. What are brand touch points and how do they affect business? Whether you realize it or not, your brand's customer touch points are working to help, or hurt, your organization's reputation with consumers. If a potential customer sees brand-related content and it piques their interest, what will they do next? They may perform a branded search (using your company name), in which case it's up to Google what your customer sees. How dost Google love thee?
6 min read
The term "fake news" took on a whole new meaning and set of consequences following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. One of the biggest stories following the election was the chaos wrought by so called “fake news” articles and publications.
7 min read
When prospects research your brand they compare you to your competitors. More specifically, they compare your search results to those of your competition. What they see online can mean the difference between contacting you and not. So step one is to improve what prospective buyers see long before they decide to contact you or not.
5 min read
Imagine a prospect is making the tough decision between using your company or your competitor. At the last minute they discover something a bit "off" about your company's online profile. Which company will get the sale?
It could be a review, a lack of publicity, a problem with your Wikipedia page, or many other things. How does reputation play into the buyers journey?
10 min read
Why do you believe the things that you believe? Why do you defend your beliefs? Why do you like others who think like you do? We like to think that our beliefs are our own, formed from our unique, individual experiences, informed by our own logic, devoid of outside bias. But "confirmation bias" is one factor that quietly pushes us to one side of the fence or the other. In short, people agree with things they already agree with.