Working with reputation: practical tips. Part 1

The results of research by such giants of analytics as JP Morgan and Interbrand show that over 33% of the shareholder value of companies is accounted for by brand value. In turn, the value of a brand largely depends on how loyal consumers are to it. That is, the market success of a business largely depends on the success of its work with the audience and reputation.

No matter how valuable and important a product you produce. Incorrectly structuring your work for the audience can nullify the effectiveness of your actions. There are practically no monopolized segments left in today's market. If a client does not like your public image, he will most likely go to a competitor.

Properly organized reputation management allows you to understand how loyal your audience, build a strategy for interacting with it, and predict the development of communications with consumers. This is a large-scale, complex, and continuous work that must go through all your activities.

If you are just planning to work with the public image of your brand, then this checklist for online reputation management will help you get started effectively. In it, we have included only proven actions that really have the expected effect.

Why online reputation?

Because the Internet today affects the image of the company more than many other channels, it is the opinion of the public that decides here, not paid advertising. According to statistics, a negative online review, even if multiplied in social networks, can cancel out the promotional effect of a powerful and costly advertising campaign. As a result, it is critical to pay attention to positive feedback from network users as well as the overall formation of your positive image.

Preparatory stage

Before proceeding to specific activities, you need to assess the current situation. And if it looks problematic, determine the essence of the difficulties. This is an important stage because all further work will depend on the information received.

Here is an approximate work plan for the preparatory stage:

• Clearly formulate the objectives of the implementation of reputation management and the reasons for the start of such work. We determine the range of measures that can be used in the work. And, most importantly, we mark the boundaries beyond which everything remains that we will definitely not use.

• We are building a reputational semantic core. That is, not general key queries about your field. But medium- and high-frequency keys by which users search specifically for your company and its products.

• We make a map of the presence of businesses on the Internet. We bring you all of the websites where your company is represented and where there are a lot of reviews about you.Be sure to reflect the balance of positive and negative reactions in the reviews, the reasons for the negativity, and the places with the largest number of "bad" reviews.

• We analyze the brand's broadcast position: what is its uniqueness, strengths, and weaknesses, and how is interaction with users built.

When all these stages are completed, we form a pool of tasks based on their results and evaluate the amount of work to be done. If any previously overlooked conditions are found, we take them into account.

Analytics by mentions

To effectively manage your online reputation, you need to know what is being "said" about your company on the Internet and whether they are saying anything at all.

The easiest way is to collect mentions manually. Sequentially, we take queries from the previously collected semantic core and search for fresh relevant records on them. You can also regularly check for new entries at sites where your brand is represented (we already have a list of them, too).

If there is not enough time for such work, you can use specialized services. This approach offers, first of all, the ability to automate the tracking of mentions. We configure the service in the right way, and without unnecessary actions, we get a selection of mentions. You can collect a report for a specific period, for a given tone of reviews, etc.

Important: Keep in mind that the geography of monitoring and the functionality of each service are individual. So for a complete picture, you may need to connect several tools at once.

Analyzing the current reputation

Based on the collected audience feedback, you will be able to understand what the general attitude of the audience towards your company is. Keep in mind that the situation here is changeable, so you need to monitor reviews constantly. This way, you will be able to adjust your reputation strategy in a timely manner and understand which techniques work and which ones simply waste your resources.

When analyzing the current situation, consider the following recommendations:

• To stay on top of changing consumer sentiment and successfully test various techniques for working with reputation and getting reliable results, assess your company's user image at least once a month.

• Isolate the causes of negativity from negative reviews; this will help identify and eliminate the problem in interactions with the consumer.

• Pay attention to how your competitors are represented on the network. What are their strengths and weaknesses noted by users? In what ways are you similar, and in what ways are you different? Ideally, such an analysis will help to prevent the mistakes that your competitor has made.

• Identify your most active audience by dividing it by the tone of reviews. For successful promotion, you need to know who praises you most often and who is most dissatisfied with others. Identify your customers' backbones on social media—this will be the start of gaining loyal fans of your brand who will help you move forward in the future.

Important: try to collect statistics on your promotional activity as well. By correlating it with the results of the analysis of user activity, you will be able to optimize the content policy and refine the overall promotion strategy.

Another valuable recommendation: consider the context of search queries. Not only semantic collection systems but also search engine hints will help you with this. Enter the company's name into the search bar to see what extras are available. If the proposed context does not suit you, you can try to replace it with a suitable one; SEO tools will help in this.