Manage your reputation, or someone else will

What do influencers think and say about you? In an era where trust is the gold standard for business and advancement, reputation plays a vital role. Reputation impacts market share. Reputation directly influences and reflects customer experience and retention. Trying to build a brand? Reputation fuels brand credibility.

How do you build and protect your company’s (or your) reputation? Years ago, negative comments or even an emerging crisis (or disinformation efforts) would often take days, weeks or longer to roll out.

No more. Today, negative information can painfully sear a corporate or personal reputation in a matter of seconds. Negative information left unanswered can directly (and adversely) flip over hard-won credibility, trust, loyalty and business operations (like sales).  An eloquent antagonistic post or harsh one-star rating can be instantly shared across thousands of platforms, driving away prospects, supporters and even customers.

The point? Reputation – which is directly engaged with brand credibility – represents a potentially fragile asset. An increasingly AI-enhanced digital environment magnifies this fragility by several orders of magnitude.

What’s more concerning? It’s often a major challenge to repair a damaged reputation, sometimes requiring extended periods of time.

Reputation is built on values

Building and protecting reputation requires a focused strategic effort. Reputations take time to build and must be based on values. Companies are known for their values, whether they define and shape them proactively – or not.

What’s of high value to your company? Your customers and key stakeholders know. Being in alignment in how you express your values – your reputation in action – builds confidence, trust and customer satisfaction. And this emphatically includes your online reputation.

Bring people together

A strong, authentic, and congruent reputation brings people together. Strong reputations build loyalty. Your customers like being associated with you. Your brand is celebrated. You benefit from that gold standard of sales: word of mouth. Your customers often sell your product or service for you – even closing a deal that you might not even have known was in the making. Bringing people together includes your employees, who directly impact your corporate reputation in a variety of critical ways.

When (not if) you face a crisis or major challenge, your reputation will stand up for you and weather any marketplace buffeting. Conversely, if you have a not-so-good or weak reputation, the crisis can be worsened when people perceive that negative comments are intended or in fact (possibly) true. Brands hemorrhage under these circumstances.

How to take action

To be clear, the phrase “reputation management” is a bit of a misnomer, even though it describes the process. A reputation is truly an award for consistent behavior and performance. Reputations are therefore earned, and not technically “managed.”

To shore up, protect and advance your reputation, certain steps and actions need to be taken over and over again. The process is never-ending, but it has its satisfying rewards.

Here’s a vital point – In this highly competitive world, one thing is for certain: you want to be actively influencing customer and stakeholder perceptions and opinions about your company and its brand(s). You should be actively focused on monitoring what people are saying and the perceptions they have – including online conversations on various platforms (like Reddit, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Threads, and others) and you should be formulating responses and taking action against reputation threats.

Conduct research

The first step? Conduct a variety of research. Much of this can be done online (at least to start) to benchmark where your reputation stands.

You probably already pay attention to your Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business). If this is unfamiliar, consider that if you don’t set it up yourself, Google will create a profile (which you can claim) about your business or organization.

Google, of course, wants you to buy ads and Google services, so you’ll see much of that (you probably already have a related AdWords account). This online real estate is critical.

But what’s important is the content and the reviews/star ratings that you should be receiving. Many potential customers (especially among Gen Z and Millennials) make their decision to buy or be associated with your company based on star ratings.

Healthcare considerations

Hospitals and healthcare organizations are especially sensitive to online reviews and star ratings. Reimbursements reflect patient satisfaction scores and ratings. Several independent platforms (Press Ganey, Healthgrades, etc.) rank hospitals, clinics, providers and physicians, drawing in part on individually submitted reviews and rankings.

The vital point? Many consumers and patients make provider and hospital decisions based on high (or low) star ratings and/or reviews. Several companies offering automated ranking support have become popular (many would say crucial) in healthcare marketing.

How powerful is online reputation management (ORM)? Consider these eye-opening stats:

• Nearly 80% of new patients first leverage online reviews in searching for a new doctor
• Nearly 50% of patients will risk going out-of-network based on a provider who has better online reviews than a current or recommended provider
• Some 84% of patients directly evaluate physicians through online reviews

The statistics reflecting consumer behavior in healthcare also mirror in part the online review power in the B2B and B2C world. These star ratings and review hold significant power and influence over key decisions.

Depending on your budget, there are many online reputation services that will conduct research for you, automate your review solicitations (and promote high star ratings) and assemble reports (and often recommended actions). In addition to more sophisticated tracking software programs, don’t forget that as a simple tactic you can use free Google Alert functionality to track mentions of your company, your competitors and other organizations that can impact your company’s reputation. Of course, much more sophisticated monitoring services and sentiment analysis are available at various pricing levels.

A critical consideration about star ratings and patient/customer satisfaction

Reputation management is not an automated “fire and forget” heat-seeking missile. Through algorithms and automated processing, healthcare (and other entities) can maximize 4+ rankings  through keyword filtering and other programming. Nothing wrong with that. But there exists one critical consideration: patient (and customer) satisfaction measurement should not (and does not) end with a star rating posting.

While a patient may gratefully post a high ranking with a great review immediately after receiving excellent treatment (or relief from pain/discomfort), follow-up needs – including dealing with revenue cycle issues about billing and care – can damage reputation if not handled appropriately. The point? Reputation is not about automation – it’s earned through consistent delivery and performance over time. And regarding public relations, companies still need to consistently tell their story to promote reputation and brand.

Audit your findings

As you find information about reputation, audit it for relevancy and action, creating a benchmark where you can begin tracking your reputation status (and your brand). And – an obvious and sometime overlooked issue – don’t forget to check out how you’re faring on Wikipedia, as if your company has (or should have) a Wikipedia article or mention, it will often show up first (or very high up) on a SERP page. This includes online applications like SEMRUSH, MOZ and functionality that measures/promotes SEO and content positioning.

Research and auditing, of course, is mostly definitely not a one-time or annual function. You should regularly monitor how your reputation is faring, including possible attacks or repositioning actions.

Create strategies

You can’t boil the ocean (unless you have unlimited budgetary resources), so you should craft specific strategies (with tactics) to guide your reputation management program. Your strategies should focus on:

• Building trust and credibility, positively highlighting your value proposition and competitive advantage(s).
• Earned media and social media – telling relatable and meaningful stories (or accounts) about your company and its brands that resonate and build your reputation. Placing stories about your company in trusted media – and yes, that still is a critical and powerful outcome of professional public relations – will give your reputation (and your brand) a critical “third-party endorsement” that will make your marketing and advertising work harder and up your brand credibility.
• Identifying and engaging points of public and stakeholder trust building. Reputation building is a contact sport.
• Developing and polishing a crisis management plan – every company will face a crisis of some kind, whether ransomware/cyberattack, product quality issue, executive indiscretion or more. Reputations have to be protected.
• Creating a “tone guide” to build responses. To build Star Ratings and respond to inquiries, you need to have language and standards to guide the development of your responses.

Of course, building a plan and having it sit forgotten on a shelf in a well-designed folder is not going to do you any good. Every plan and strategy require action and constant updating, as well as formal tracking. A tough challenge? The “rinse and repeat” nature of building, monitoring, protecting, and advancing the reputation of a company.

Don’t leave such critical and vital assets to the machinations of others – build, protect and advance your reputation now!

Contact MEK today for seasoned and on-target help in protecting your valuable reputation. Also, how does this figure into building markets?

By Michael Snyder, MEK.