Business Reputation and Social Media Management (Part 4)

Social Media Lawyers: Business Reputation and Social Media Management (Part 4)

The three simple, yet crucially important steps that help prevent online reputation crisis are taken very seriously by CEOs,entrepreneurs and great leaders of companies of all shapes and sizes.

Make sure you have processes in place to regularly search the internet for your company’s name and brand.

Steve Jobs, Willie Walsh, Richard Branson and the business owner of my local printing shop all have acknowledged with their action that obtaining direct feedback from their customers is one of the most important steps they, and leaders can take to reduce the risks of their organisation having to deal with online reputation crisis.

Prevention however is only the first step that business owners need to take to reduce the risk of online damage to their company's reputation.

There are two other important steps that will tremendously help them achieve this goal. As the Dell Hell example shows, the art of LISTENING could also make a significant difference to the organisation's online reputation.

Listening to customers as a preventative measure to reduce risk of defamation against your company

Read and hear what your customers are saying about you. Make sure you have processes in place to regularly search the internet for your company’s name and brand.

If you do not have an in-house or external internet reputation management team, at least use free tools such as Google Alerts or Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com.) These tools will reveal many of the blogs and discussion groups where your company’s name has been mentioned.

This is what your customers will see when they search for your company. Hopefully, you won’t find anything alarming. Even if you don’t, you should continue monitoring any particular websites and forums that might become a hotbed for disgruntled customers.

If you do find unpleasant comments, don’t despair. It’s not the end of the world, and there is plenty you can do to repair the damage. Depending on the number of customers your company serves, it may be inevitable that some negative publicity will appear on the internet.

You cannot do anything about this, but you can certainly manage the information to make sure customers know your company is being transparent and helpful.

Read part 5 of the Business Reputation Management and Social Media series.
Read part 1 of the Business Reputation Management and Social Media series.
Read part 2 of the Business Reputation Management and Social Media series.
Read part 3 of the Business Reputation Management and Social Media series.