Today’s Tip
Best Practice: Protect your brand with brand reputation management. Monitor your brand regularly, respond quickly and proactively.
Today’s Article: Protecting Your Brand with Brand Reputation Management
What is Brand Reputation Management?
Brand reputation management is monitoring the brand to see how people are connecting with the brand. With brand reputation management, comes a proactive strategy to respond to people’s positive comments and negative or critical comments.
Brand Reputation Strategies
1. Automate Monitoring of the Brand
With an alert service, such as Google Alert, the business is notified and receives an email notification any time someone mentions the company, product or service. Now the business can see what is being said about them and respond accordingly.
2. Monitoring Your Brand by Searching
There are online services where companies can search for references about their company, product or service. Example is WhosTalkin.com, which is a social media search tool that allows users to search for online conversations in the world of social media.
3. Keep an Open Line of Communication with the Company
Make it easy for people to communicate with the company. Provide multiple ways for people to communicate with the company: phone, email, live chat, in person, mail, etc. When it is easy and with multiple ways for people to connect with the company, it can defuse situations earlier in the customer feedback process before they escalate and/or go public.
4. Encourage Positive Feedback
Make it easy and provide multiple ways for people to provide positive feedback about the company, a product or services. Testimonials are a great way to build a brand. Ways to get feedback can be surveys, feedback cards, feedback requests on receipts, reach out directly to customers, focus groups, or using analytics.
5. Respond Quickly and Proactively to Negative Feedback
Respond quickly to negative feedback. Have a proactive strategy on how to handle this type of feedback. Have employees trained on how to positively respond to negative feedback. Look for ways to take this situation and turn it into a positive customer experience. It is not a question that a business will have negative feedback, but when it will occur. People have different expectations and perceptions about the same experience.
6. Review Company, Product or Service Platforms
With websites and social media, regularly check them to make sure they are accurate and how people are responding to them, such as reviews. Again, encourage and respond to positive reviews. Quickly and proactively respond to negative reviews. Keep lines of communication open. Make it easy and provide multiple ways for customers to provide feedback to the business.
Action Step: Implement a brand management reputation program. You have two options, do-it-yourself or hire an outside agency.
Additional Resources
Do-it-yourself Brand Management
10 sites to check-out: Google Alerts, Tweet Alarm, Social Mention, If This Then That, Bad Reputation, Custom Search Box, Image Raider
Use an Outside Agency
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