Deciphering how to look after your company's e-reputation
Does your company have a good or bad e-reputation?
What you say about yourself on the web can have a huge impact on your business. From online reviews to press articles, not forgetting posts and videos from influencers who test your products, there are many consequences arising from what is said about you, both good and bad!
According to an IFOP study, 47% of French people say they have already given up buying a product or service from a brand because of a scandal. This figure rises to 59% among 18-24 year-olds.
But there's no need to be alarmed. With a well-honed strategy and the intelligent use of software, you can monitor your digital reputation, anticipate potential crises and repair the damage.
Find out more in this article co-written by Anthony Rochand, consultant, trainer andco-founder of LEW.
Corporate e-reputation: definition and issues
What is e-reputation?
With the rise of the internet, a brand's reputation is being built (and destroyed) mainly online. Hence the emergence of the term " corporate e-reputation " or " cyber-reputation ".
The latter is defined by all the information circulating about a company on the web, and by the image it conveys.
It should be noted that a company's reputation is at stake across all media, including :
- social media such as Facebook and Twitter
- search engines
- review sites,
- and through the intermediary of numerous players to which we will return in more detail.
💡 However, differentiate your e-reputation from the brand image you have consciously built up.
The particularity of online reputation lies in the fact that it can escape you.
The importance of consumer reviews
Reputation has a considerable influence on how consumers perceive a brand, product or service.
Internet users rely more on consumer reviews than on "traditional" advertising to form their opinion of a product and to validate their purchase.
According to a Nielsen study, 78% of Internet users say they trust recommendations from strangers, such as those recorded on online review platforms.
That's why you need to take a serious look at your e-reputation, even if you've never been the victim of a bad buzz. The negative opinions that accumulate gradually and insidiously denigrate the image of your brand.
The consequences of bad buzz
Information circulates much more quickly on the web. Internet users are constantly connected, have the possibility of filming a slip-up at any time and exchanging views in real time.
The result? A subject can go viral in no time, with dramatic consequences for a company.
Let's remember the textbook case of the bad buzz that affected United Airlines in 2017: following the violent (and filmed) eviction of a passenger due to overbooking, the company suffered a stock market loss of 4% equivalent... to a billion dollars!
The question of recruitment
There's another e-reputation issue that companies don't think about enough: recruitment and employer branding.
Like consumers, candidates have gained in power. As a result, a company with a bad reputation finds it harder to recruit the most qualified profiles.
Here too, the harmful consequences are felt over the long term.
The players in corporate e-reputation
You and your employees
Don't forget that you are the main guarantor of your e-reputation: according to Steven Van Belleghem's The conversation manager, 84% of reputation crises are internal.
And out of 32 crises :
- 47% were caused by the communications department,
- 18% from the marketing department
- and 15% from employees or ex-employees.
Your employees, sometimes unaware of the challenges of digital, sometimes cause major damage.
⚡ Let's remember, for example, the bad-buzz caused in 2016 by two SFR employees filming themselves live on Periscope deliberately breaking a customer's phone!
The media
By communicating information, publishing a survey or relaying a buzz, the media continue to have a major influence on a brand's reputation.
What's more, news generally rises to the top of the list of Google results.
As a result, an Internet user entering your company's name in the search engine is more likely to come across an article relaying news about you than any other type of content.
Influencers
Influencers have become increasingly important in recent years. Some of them even have several million followers! Present on a variety of social networks, they share their opinions on products from a wide range of sectors (fashion, beauty, high-tech, travel, etc.).
As opinion leaders, they have the power to literally boost sales with the right product placement.
On the other hand, they can damage a brand's reputation if they have had a bad experience.
Your competitors
Unfortunately, in the race for the best e-reputation, you are bound to come up against "anti-gambling". Fake negative reviews posted on platforms, unjustified defamation on social networks, false information spread on the web... sometimes the competition doesn't play fair.
And because Internet users don't always know what's real and what's not, your image and your sales suffer.
7 best practices in corporate e-reputation
Look after your offer and your brand image...
Would the Spanghero company have suffered as much from the scandal if it hadn't sold ready-made meals containing horsemeat without the consumer's knowledge?
So keep an eye on what you're selling and work on your brand image, your communications and your community management.
... and your customer relations
Concentrate your efforts on optimising customer relations and the customer experience.
By communicating with your customers in the right way and at the right time, you minimise the risk of negative comments multiplying.
To achieve this, use solutions. RingCentral Customer Experience, for example, centralises the dialogue between your brand and your customers.
Thanks to easier exchanges, you're better able to satisfy them: no more scattered conversations between social networks, emails and your points of sale.
As a result, your teams become much more responsive to any incidents they encounter. And customers are less tempted to leave a bad review of your brand.
Assessing risks and anticipating crises
The scale of crises can vary depending on your reputation and whether or not you are a key player in your field.
Once you've assessed your risks, you're in a better position to anticipate crises, particularly those linked to your business sector (where your meat comes from if you're in the food industry, workers' working conditions if you operate in textiles, etc.).
💡 Unfortunately, even with a well-honed strategy for preserving your e-reputation, a bad-buzz can still happen.
You can't prevent everything! So consider a crisis plan, just in case.
To put it in place:
- identify the various attacks you could fall victim to: a scandal linked to the sensitivity of your sector, a dissatisfied customer, a smear campaign by one of your competitors, etc. ;
- plan how to react to each situation and what communications strategy to deploy.
✅ The sooner you act, the sooner you can prevent the situation from escalating.
Monitor your e-reputation
To protect your e-reputation, set up a permanent internet watch.
This will enable you to find out everything that's being said about you, and act accordingly.
To do this, ask yourself:
- Which channels should I monitor?
As this is an important measure, focus on the places where people are talking about you the most, where content relating to your brand carries the most weight.
Are these social networks? If so, which ones? Or online review sites? Blogs? - What e-reputation KPIs should you put in place?
They can be of different kinds, depending on your business and your objectives. For example:- How often do you come across mentions of your brand on social networks?
- How often are you mentioned compared to your competitors?
- What is your ratio of negative comments? etc.
Monitoring tools such as Simple Feedback have been developed to make your task easier.
This software doesn't just monitor social networks. It's a comprehensive media monitoring tool, equipped with an artificial intelligence called HaPPi.
It monitors and collects everything that is written about you on the web, on a wide range of websites (Amazon, Google Shopping, Facebook, etc.).
The result is 24/7 monitoring that's far more comprehensive than what a human being could ever do.
Simple Feedback can also sort reviews and comments into positive and negative categories, making them easier to interpret and process.
Or you can opt forVisibrain, software that alerts you in real time by text message, email, Slack or Telegram to conversations about your company on social networks. Keep up to date with this easy-to-use tool thanks to an advanced filtering and sorting system. Automatically prioritise content by impact and analyse the data using Smartboards, next-generation dashboards, to act accordingly and make more informed decisions.
💡 To monitor your reputation and set up your monitoring, pay attention to your semantics! Take into account all the ways Internet users can spell your name. For example: appvizer, apvizer, appviser, etc.
Repair your e-reputation
Is your e-reputation not up to scratch? Does a study of your KPIs reveal major problems with your online reputation?
Fortunately, you have the means to take action. To do so, follow these tips:
React to content that mentions you
This advice applies to both positive and negative content:
- Respond to bad comments, judiciously and quickly, and above all don't delete them!
- Do everything in your power to satisfy the customer and prevent the situation from escalating.
- Make sure you also respond to positive comments: this gesture, which is often overlooked, increases your sympathy capital and shows Internet users that you take their involvement into consideration.
Practice curing
This involves "politely" getting rid of negative content.
In other words, you contact the authors or moderators of the site on which you have spotted a bad comment and explain to them in a friendly way why the content is problematic and/or unjustified.
With a bit of luck, they'll remove it.
Use flooding
As we've seen, a recent bad buzz is more likely to rise to the top of the search results page.
To curb the phenomenon, resort to flooding: "drown out" the negative by producing optimised content that makes it to the first page, thereby relegating the harmful content to Google's limbo.
The case of fake reviews
As mentioned above, unfair competition can lead to the publication of false negative reviews about you.
Some companies, the famous "click farms", have even specialised in this unsavoury business.
In this case, the techniques mentioned in the previous paragraph also apply:
- Contact the moderators of the sites that publish reviews as soon as you spot a fake negative review, and ask them to remove it.
Be aware that you have the law on your side: since 1 January 2018, two decrees implementing the Lemaire law (relating to digital technology) have strengthened the obligation of fairness on the internet.
As a result, the DGCCRF (Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes) can issue penalty notices in the event of abuse. - Practice flooding, by collecting a large number of REAL positive reviews.
To collect these reviews, use specific software. Je donne mon avis, for example, allows you to :
- produce surveys,
- act quickly and effectively in the event of bad reviews,
- but also to look after your e-reputation by publishing your positive comments on your site and your fan pages.
You can take action on two key aspects of the quality of your e-reputation at the same time:
- identify your customers' expectations and strengthen ties with them by showing them that you take their feelings into account;
- easily publish qualified positive reviews and improve your online reputation.
Using an e-reputation agency
Many brands call on professionals to carry out an e-reputation and visibility diagnostic.
Solocal's Digital Audit starts by assessing your online presence, its consistency and your referencing through :
- your website, if you have one
- your blogs
- your business pages, on Google for example
- directories
- social networks.
The agency offers you a free personalised analysis and assessment, with recommendations. Because being absent from the web, or with incomplete or obsolete information, can seriously damage your digital reputation.
Finally, note that it is entirely possible to call in an e-reputation agency in the event of force majeure, during a crisis for example. In such a situation, e-reputation professionals more easily have the necessary resources to carry out flooding, for example.
E-reputation: useful tools
You have seen some of the software references illustrated in this article, so don't hesitate to consult our page dedicated to reputation management software to find out about others.
Ultimately, e-reputation has become a dimension of your business that needs to be monitored and worked on continuously, just like customer experience or customer relations.
To maintain a good online reputation, you need to prevent as well as act. And with the ever-changing behaviours of online consumers and web users, you need to stay alert and vigilant. Because as the famous American businessman and investor Warren Buffet once said :
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy it. If you keep that in mind, you'll behave differently.
Article mis à jour, initialement publié en octobre 2019.
Article translated from French