“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett (CEO/Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway)
Those five minutes can emerge from the circulation of a viral video, a bad review, or a single tweet. But the real question is how such perceptions are actually shaped and how to understand the public sentiments.
Misinterpreting online media buzz and news can adversely affect public perception, shareholder value, regulatory standing, customer loyalty, and the overall brand reputation.
Therefore, organizations must prioritize the implementation of a comprehensive reputation management strategy to understand where, when, and how the public perception forms and spreads. According to Deloitte’s global survey on reputation risk, 87% of company executives consider the management of reputation risk far more crucial than other strategic risks.
Nowadays, a company’s reputation management tools must ensure instant vigilance, automated actions, and assessment of real-time brand mentions in social and digital media across the globe. The manual media monitoring checks often miss fast-moving conversations across digital platforms. Therefore, it is crucial to examine the significance of an automated reputation management strategy to help brands act before any negative coverage goes viral.
Prominence of Effective Reputation Management in the Age of Innovation
Reputation management isn’t just about scanning headlines after an event has happened and issuing press releases days later to clarify or justify. It is about monitoring and assessing how the public perceives a certain event. In fact, it has become a core component of building the marketing strategy in order to position a product or service in response to public perceptions.
Even reputation management firms need real-time and smart tools to stay ahead. These firms must monitor emerging crises and track online sentiments to build effective reputation management strategies for their clients. With automated reputation monitoring, firms can transform raw data into actionable insights, enabling them to amplify positive narratives and neutralize negative feedback before it escalates.
The instant alert generation and real-time monitoring allow businesses to stay ahead of potential reputation threats the moment they arise. Whether it’s a sudden surge in negative sentiment or a subtle shift in public tone, contextual risk assessment ensures that the right issues are flagged promptly.
Impact of Reputation Management on Business Operations
Here are some critical aspects, showing how reputation affects the business operations and the role of media monitoring in this digital business framework:
- A brand’s reputation is the cornerstone of both customer trust and business partnerships, but the value it holds differs for each audience.
For Customers, a reputable brand signals safety and credibility, which reassures that their investments are in good hands. Maintaining a strong public image directly influences customer loyalty and buying decisions, as it ensures that they are consuming products and services from reputable brands.
For Partners, reputation becomes a due diligence checkpoint. Before initiating long-term collaborations, partners rely on real-time adverse media searches, public sentiment analysis, and keyword tracking to assess the company’s reliability. - By integrating automated and real-time media monitoring tech, brands can timely analyze the sentiments of a particular event on diverse media forums. This helps business managers identify and tackle the negative news and perceptions in real-time.
- As Part of reputation management, brands not only try to avert a catastrophe but also end up getting valuable insights through decades-old data, which enhances their market research and background check practices by assessing the past trends and mistakes that they can avoid now to shape their branding strategies.
Categories of Reputation Management Services – Power of Sentiment Analysis
Many historical events have revealed that the tone behind a review, tweet, or headline can either make or break the reputation of any brand. During such unsaid moments, sentiment analysis becomes the unsung guardian of diverse reputation management services.
The significance of an effective and real-time sentiment scoring is prominent in the following reputation management strategies:
- Online Reputation Management: Online reputation management begins with the understanding of public perception, which starts with the analysis of what people are saying and how they feel. By understanding the popular customer perceptions during the initial stages, brands seamlessly detect emotional shifts and emerging trends across social media platforms. It’s about actively managing the narrative before it spirals on social media.
- Brand Crisis Management: During the initial hour when a crisis hits, those companies that understand which conversations are spreading fast and which are emotionally charged are way beyond their competitors in terms of crisis management. The real-time entity searches and sentiment scoring allow brands to prioritize the analysis of the most intense and urgent media drifts.
- Review/Feedback Management: Review assessments are less meaningful without understanding their context and underlying reasons. A complete media analysis allows brands to identify the key indicators that lead to a brand crisis. Through a comprehensive sentiment tracking, brands can address the negative sentiments and shape their strategies accordingly to prevent future brand crises.
Now that we have explored the key categories of reputation management and the significant influence of sentiment analysis, let’s explore the scenarios that occur when brands overlook them, because even the best strategies mean nothing without proper execution.
Case Studies – Challenges in Online Reputation Management
Companies that overlook public sentiments and misread warning signs often find themselves in the headlines for usually the wrong reasons. Here are a few real-life case studies of brand strategy failures, showing the impact of certain campaign actions and the significance of real-time crisis response:
Starbucks Racial Prejudice Case
In 2018, Starbucks was struck by a racially-charged incident when two African-Americans were arrested for trespassing due to the excessive delay from the store’s associate. The company found itself struggling with a racial bias controversy.
This controversy prompted a negative sentiment about the company in the media. By promptly analyzing the situation, Starbucks issued an apology and announced the temporary closure of various outlets across the country to promote racial bias training.
The company’s prompt response to this controversy shows the importance of immediate actions and lasting change. However, had Starbucks had access to the instant sentiment scoring, they could’ve reacted more proactively and identified the warning signs in real-time while preventing the crisis from turning into a viral media outrage.
Domino’s Pizza Quality Crisis
In the late 2000s, Domino’s faced severe backlash when employees posted a video showing unsanitary food handling practices, which went viral, leading to significant reputational damage.
Instead of avoiding the negative stance and feedback, Domino’s launched an ad campaign where the executives addressed the harsh reviews to promote relatability with their target audience. By addressing the quality issues, the company handled the reputation crisis.
These efforts led to a surge in the company’s sales, which reported a 14.3% rise. However, the implementation of a real-time sentiment analysis could’ve tracked the customer dissatisfaction before it accelerated into a global issue.
A person may not write a whole news article based on a bad experience at a fast food outlet, but they may share their review on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. While the same brand may scan some popular media outlets to look for any word of mouth, they may not know exactly the buzz is across all those social media channels (Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat). Here, sentiment analysis tools that analyze data of millions of reviews and even informal reviews in the form of content can let brands and even countries know what the perception is about their particular brand.
Critical Considerations While Choosing Reputation Management Companies
An effective reputation strategy begins with an understanding of the kind of sentiments that prevail among certain groups. With an instant sentiment snapshot of trending media buzz, brands gain the clarity needed to craft responses and campaigns that actually resonate.
Brands must be considerate when it comes to responding thoughtfully to the feedback, both positive and negative. This ensures a level of empathetic engagement that ultimately builds long-term trust with the customers. Additionally, with a comprehensive media monitoring technology, businesses can timely identify and address all the touchpoints for gaps and improvements in the overall branding strategy.
Intellectual Appetizer:
Every review is a window into the customer experience shaping. So, are you looking through it or closing the blinds?The ignorance of feedback and online reviews means missing out on free, but effective and real-time media insights, which are crucial for managing a company’s reputation.
With the understanding of social media listening analytics, businesses can seamlessly measure the public sentiments towards all the events that may pose a threat to a certain brand, organization, entity, or industry. This enables brands to prevent a reputation crisis in real-time.
Start Your Reputation Resilience With Media Watcher
Reputation management is all about taking prompt action in a crisis without delay. With Media Watcher’s real-time sentiment scoring, brands can understand the diverse market perspectives to ensure profitable decision-making.
Our customized entity search enables businesses to identify the sentiments of an event in a particular country and a specific language. With access to decades-old data, brands can seamlessly conduct thorough research on an entity as it simplifies access to the most relevant and authentic sources in a matter of seconds.
Media Watcher manages the company’s reputation by:
- Analyzing the exact sentiment of multiple news sources from around the globe in real-time.
- Providing brands with an understanding of media coverage that impacts the credibility of the brand.
- Allowing companies to discover valuable insights to prevent a reputation crisis.
