Your brand reputation is one of the most valuable—if not the most valuable—elements of your business—which is why it’s surprising that so many companies decide to risk their brand reputation, leaving themselves completely vulnerable to crisis.
The first step to protecting your brand reputation is monitoring what is being said about your company online. The name of the game here is breadth, so we recommend that you monitor at least the following for your company, key employees and primary competitors:
- Google search results
- Google news results
- Google image results
- Social media results (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc.)
- Review sites (Google, industry-specific review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, G2Crowd, Avvo etc.)
There are several viable free and paid tools to help automate some or all of the monitoring process. Even then, the reporting received requires human interaction for understanding the initial input, interpreting results and determining the most appropriate course of action. And how often should you review monitoring results? Crisis communications case studies would suggest daily—to be able to see potential issues brewing before they turned into large problems or heated conversations—but this may not be practical for most busy companies, with research showing that many review quarterly at most.
Instead, savvy businesses prefer to entrust their most valuable business asset to a professional reputation management firm. A reputation management firm keeps intelligent eyes on the pulse of your online reputation with diligent monitoring, communication and optimization.