Decoding 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 major impact on your business. From online reviews to press articles, 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. Thanks to a well-honed strategy, and the intelligent use of software, you'll be able to 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 challenges
What is e-reputation?
With the rise of the Internet, a brand's reputation is mainly built (and destroyed) 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.
Note that a company's reputation is at stake on all media, such as :
- social media such as Facebook and Twitter
- search engines
- review sites,
- and through the intermediary of numerous players to which we'll return in greater detail.
💡 However, differentiate your e-reputation from the brand image you've consciously built.
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 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 your brand's image.
The consequences of bad buzz
Information circulates much faster on the web. Internet users are constantly connected, with the possibility of filming a slip-up at any moment and exchanging views in real time.
The result? A subject can go viral in no time, with dramatic consequences for the company.
Let's recall the textbook case of the bad buzz that affected United Airlines in 2017: following the violent (and filmed) expulsion of a passenger due to overbooking, the company suffered a stock market loss of 4% equivalent... to a billion dollars!
The recruitment issue
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.
The negative consequences are also felt in 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, the reputation crisis is internal in 84% of cases.
And out of 32 crises :
- 47% resulted from the communications department,
- 18% from the marketing department
- and 15% from employees or ex-employees.
Your employees, sometimes unaware of digital issues, 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 strong 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 typing your company's name into the search engine is more likely to come across an article relaying news about you than any other type of content.
Influencers
In recent years, influencers have gained in importance. Some of them even have millions of followers! Present on various 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.
Conversely, they can damage a brand's reputation if they've had a bad experience.
Your competitors
Unfortunately, in the race for the best e-reputation, you're bound to come up against some "anti-gambling". False 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 sales suffer.
7 best practices in corporate e-reputation
Take care of 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, communications and community management.
... and your customer relations
Concentrate your efforts on optimizing your customer relations and experience.
By communicating with your customers in the right way and at the right time, you minimize the risk of negative feedback.
To achieve this, you need solutions. RingCentral Customer Experience, for example, centralizes 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 incidents. And customers are less tempted to leave a bad review of your brand.
Assess risks and anticipate crises
The scale of crises can vary according to 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 business, workers' working conditions if you're 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 communication 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 enables you to keep abreast of 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.
The latter monitors and collects everything written about you on the web, across 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 achieve.
Simple Feedback can also be used to sort reviews and comments into positive and negative categories, making them easier to interpret and process.
Or you can opt forVisibrain, a software application that alerts you in real time by sms, email, Slack or Telegram to conversations around your company on social networks. Keep up to date with this easy-to-use tool thanks to an advanced filtering and sorting system. Automatically prioritize content by impact and analyze data using Smartboards, next-generation dashboards, to act accordingly and make more informed decisions.
💡 To monitor your reputation and set up your watch, 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, wisely and promptly, 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, often overlooked, increases your sympathy capital and shows Internet users that you take their involvement into consideration.
Curing your site
This means "politely" getting rid of negative content.
In other words, you contact the authors or moderators of the site on which you've spotted a bad comment and gently explain to them why the content is problematic and/or unjustified.
Hopefully, 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 optimized content that rises to the first page, thereby relegating the bad 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 so-called "click farms", have even specialized in this unsavory business.
In this case, the techniques mentioned in the previous paragraph also apply:
- Contact the moderators of review sites as soon as you spot a fake negative review, and ask them to remove it.
Know that you've got the law on your side: since January 1, 2018, two decrees implementing the Lemaire law (relating to digital) have reinforced 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 procès-verbaux in the event of abuse. - Practice flooding, by collecting a large number of REAL positive reviews.
To collect these reviews, you'll need special 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 enhance your e-reputation by publishing positive comments on your site and fan pages.
You can implement actions to act simultaneously on two dimensions that are important to the quality of your e-reputation:
- identify your customers' expectations and forge closer links with them, showing them that you take their feelings into account;
- easily publish qualified positive reviews and improve your online reputation.
Calling on an e-reputation agency
Many brands call on professionals to carry out an e-reputation and visibility diagnosis.
Solocal's Digital Audit starts by assessing your online presence, its consistency and your SEO 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 personalized analysis and assessment, with recommendations. Because being absent from the web, or with incomplete or out-of-date information, can seriously damage your digital reputation.
Finally, it's perfectly possible to call in an e-reputation agency in the event of force majeure, such as a crisis. In such a situation, e-reputation professionals have the resources they need to carry out flooding, for example.
E-reputation: useful tools
Now that you've discovered some of the software references illustrated in this article, 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 behaviors of cyber-consumers and Internet users, you need to stay alert and vigilant. 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