What’s Your Rep? 6 Ways to Enhance Your Company’s Reputation

December 5, 2012 Moreover Technologies Leave a Comment

By Zachary Enos, Marketing Catalyst, 9Lenses

Sometimes business should ignore Mother Nature. Take “safety in numbers,” for instance. It’s usually a great survival strategy, but in business it becomes a liability. The more employees, customers, and exposure you have, the more opportunities your firm has, quite frankly, to fail. In today’s world, more people manage your brand than the “brand manager.”

The stakes are high. The social era equips every customer, employee, reporter, and media outlet with lethal weapons of brand destruction. Any cell-pic, twitter feed, or comment can bumble its way into the news. We’ve seen Twitter and YouTube debacles mar brands like Domino’s Pizza overnight.

In an effort to secure the castle, most brand managers focus exclusively on external threats. External reputation matters, but don’t forget that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Investment in brand loyalty amongst employees raises up more defenders of the castle, whilst mitigating internal risks.

9Lenses teamed up with Moreover Technologies to bring you these six tips to balance your internal and external reputation. Moreover Technologies brings home the bacon by monitoring news and media channels for some of the world’s biggest brands, while 9Lenses deploys a social platform that collects employee sentiment and thoughts across every part of a business.

I. “Our House:” Nurturing Your Internal Rep.

1) Listen to Your People

Quality people drive quality organizations. If you want to turn top employees into raving fans, you’ve got to help them fall in love with your company. How? It’s not that complicated: in fact, you foster company fans in the same way you’d grow a friendship. Friendships deepen when both parties really listen and hear one another.

You can do the same thing in every part of your company. Find a way to ask all of your people to comment on your business’s every process, system, and goal. You want to find out how your stakeholders perceive your organization’s health.  Your people want to contribute! They want to be heard. Reward those who contribute at the highest level because high participation rates increase the quality of the resulting data.

2) Track Perceptions

Listening is only the first step. You must then act on the insights offered. Tell your people “we heard you, and seek to solve the problems you identified.” Next, create implementation teams and workflows to promote the best ideas offered. Reengage those teams over time to drive accountability, feedback, and execution.

Great employees can spot disingenuous engagement efforts a mile away, so make sure you’re genuine. If they’re given the opportunity to speak and your company doesn’t respond, you can kiss your internal fan base good-bye.

3) Empower Don’t Manage

Imagine for a moment, two coaches. The first, feels like he works hard but his team slacks off. They just won’t follow “the plan,” so he compensates by barking orders and refuses to hear any thoughts but his own. Does he drive performance? In a Machiavellian sense, sure. But in a world where his office tirades can be splattered all over your brand, his approach is a major liability.

The second coach is quite the opposite. “I hired great people, “ she reasons, “they ought to know how I can optimize their performance.” She combines her people’s feedback with her experience to create relevant KPIs. She distributes resources to empower not control, reduces permission seeking, and rewards employees who give back. She rocks, and people love working for her. Her employees become little brand evangelists who use their circles of influence to spot and mitigate brand assaults before they spread.

II. “Outside the Gates:” Building a Siege Proof Exterior Rep.

4) Build Trust

You’re halfway there! Your house is in order. Now it’s time to look outside into the mysterious beyond. This is a customer-centric world. Invest significant time, energy, and resources into discovering precisely who your customer is and what makes them tick.

Customers trust those who help them understand and solve their problems. Be that source of educational content on your chosen topic of expertise. Blog where they read and publish in their newspapers. When someone offers positive feedback, leverage it to gain the trust in his or her circle of influence.

5) Target Niche Markets

As a marketer, I can tell you that great messages are tight. I can beat industry standard “click through” and “open rates” every time if the offering is tightly linked to my prospects personalities, pain-points, and needs. If you hit the nail on the head, adoption becomes viral and is rapidly passed from one relevant prospect to another, effortlessly.

A Belgium based company called Engagor helps clients like Volvo Group, McDonalds, Ikea, and the European Parliament target their brands toward niche clients by managing their brands online. Engagor partnered with Moreover to give clients confidence that websites of every size in every country were being thoroughly tracked, so Engagor clients could micro-sell their brands to key niches. Using technology like Moreover’s Newsdesk to track brand impressions in micro-markets is key to braking into niches.

6) 360 Your Rep

Even a king can fall to a stray arrow, so too can a healthy firm fall to a news article on an obscure website. You’ve got to find tools to help you see, assess, and respond to brand mentions in online/print news outlets, social media channels, word-of-mouth rumors, and tv/radio spotlights. In short, you need to see your brand from every possible angle—360 insight.

The world is moving too fast to drop the ball on this one. One of the best places to start is with news outlets. Take the Business Intelligence team at Shell Oil. They’re constantly on the lookout for tools to keep their team informed. Industry trends, brand mentions, competitive positioning, and political landscape refocus their strategies, constantly.

Like Engagor, Shell  leverages Moreover Technologies’ Newsdesk service to set highly targeted news feeds that parse critical stories and brand mentions for employees at every level of the company. With one service, they get a nearly 360-degree view of their brand, market, and competitors all in one intuitive interface. That’s exactly the sort of technology communications professionals can leverage to snapshot their reputation from every angle.

Filed under: internal communications,market intelligence

Tags: 9lenses, perceptions, reputation, trust