Brand building and reputation management are two sides of a coin. What brand managers do to build their company’s reputation can come crashing down overnight with the keystroke of an angry blogger.
Managing a company’s reputation used to be a back-channel activity, known only to a few. Today, company reputation is available to everyone. It is radically transparent.
Fellow blogger Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim just released a book with Dr. Judy Strauss titled Radically Transparent. It’s a how-to guide for anyone needing to manage a reputation, whether B2B, B2C or even C2C. To complement the book, Andy has launched a service called Trackur that can help you monitor and manage a reputation.
I managed to grab Andy on his way to SXSW to discuss what’s changing in reputation management. Enjoy …
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About Andy
Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant specializing in search engine marketing, online reputation management, and business blogging. Considered one of the world’s most respected online marketing experts, Andy has worked with many top companies such as Motorola, GlaxoSmithKline, SAS, Lowes, Quicken Loans, and NBC.
Highly respected as a source of internet marketing advice, Andy Beal has had articles published around the world, including BusinessWeek Online, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Guide, and Web Pro News. He is the co-author of an online reputation management book called Radically Transparent which can be found on Amazon.com.
This was a very thought provoking podcast.
I think that it is equally important to be proactive and manage one’s reputation by ensuring that the customer experience at all the brand’s touch points is a positive one. Company’s need to make their brand strategy their operating strategy. Instead branding is left to the marketing department and not viewed as being part of everyone’s job. That’s when you have employees or systems do things that are inconsistent or in direct conflict with the brand positioning.
Very often a company’s bureaucratic policies and rules are at odds with their stated goal of being customer focused. A great way to begin the process of proactive reputation management is to make sure that policies and procedures are, to the extent that they can be, customer friendly, from return policies to dispute management to services provided. These are key touch points that are often the source of negative word of mouth by customers.
Monitoring is good and very necessary. However, if you’re truly customer focused and everyone in the company is living the brand and doing their part, then it’s a good chance you will be creating customer advocates and evangelists. Your monitoring should then reflect those efforts.
Lloyd
You make some excellent points on operationalizing the brand strategy.
Another good piece of this is working on the infrastructure for listening such as your call center (or 800 number) as well as your general email box – monitoring those as well for feedback is also important.
Lloyd, you make some excellent points and we echo your sentiment in Radically Transparent.
The travel industry is a great example of where a lot of reputation damage could be avoided by better empowering employees.