What is Reputation Management when it comes to a celebrity or brand?
Reputation management is to help the influence of what and how people see a brand or person/celebrity when viewed online. Put another way, character is who you are. Reputation is whom other people think you are, and today it's based mainly on what artificial intelligence systems portray about you rather than the first-person experience.
Reputation management goes by a variety of names — online reputation management (ORM), internet reputation management, rep management, brand perception. Whatever you call it, the goal is to shape public perception about a person/celebrity or business, though you may be surprised to learn just how little control brands and individuals can actually have over their reputations.
How to manage a reputation - how much control do you really have?
This article will delve into the how's and why's of reputation management, as well as what you can do to maintain or improve your brand or celebrity figure’s own reputation.
We’ll first provide a more detailed explanation of reputation management, which will demonstrate just how important it is.
Second, we’ll demonstrate the amount of control you can have over your reputation.
Finally, we’ll float the question, can reputation be managed?
Everyone can benefit from learning more about the topic, whether you are just starting to build a personal reputation or in charge of PR for a major brand. If your company’s reputation is at risk, then grasping the basics of reputation management is critical for your business’s ongoing survival. If you want to shape your own personal reputation, then knowing what’s at stake, who’s in control and how to influence people’s perceptions starts with the same foundational question: What is reputation management?
Definition of reputation management
Here is Honest London’s definition of reputation management:
Reputation management is the effort to influence what and how people think of a brand or person.
The above definition covers what reputation management is at its core. But of course, there is much more to it. Definitions can only take you so far. In this section, we’ll build out this nascent definition of reputation management by explaining seven critical aspects:
1. Reputation management happens mostly online
A vast amount of communication happens online. We meet friends, we solve disagreements, we discover new businesses, and we read the news. We even spend our leisure time online. It’s inevitable, therefore, that reputation management happens mostly in the online space; in fact, the terms reputation management and online reputation management are now virtually synonymous.
So reputation management happens online because that's where the majority of our communication happens. Since people choose to interact on online platforms, brands like Honest London use social media and SEO tactics for example to achieve their goals.
2. Reputation management empowers your sales and marketing
Reputation management lives within the wide world of sales and marketing, and though it can be described as a “tactic,” it’s hardly negligible. In reality, reputation management is a core component of sales and marketing. Why? Because what people think of a brand influences everything about that brand. It's nearly impossible to sell a product to a clientele that doesn't trust or believe in your brand. There’s a reason we called ourself Honest London, we have to live up to this day to day and for good reason. If our clients know we’re Honest London, they can openly trust us.
With a good reputation management plan, you can clear the way for positive messages to have the maximum effect. When people already believe in your company's mission your content will reach more of its readers.
3. Reputation management is essential for a business’s/celebrities survival
We’re not overstating the case when we write that reputation management is essential for a company’s survival. Enron vanished in the wake of corruption and the ensuing public relations backlash. Other giants like BP, Wells Fargo, and United Airlines have been able to withstand reputation blowups, but not without serious costs.
These are all examples of how the emergence of online communication platforms has made reputation more delicate. Whereas before people who had a bad experience with a business may have only told a few close friends, now they have the ability to publish their views online, where they can reach thousands, even millions of people. These days, a single badly handled situation can quickly plunge a company into bankruptcy.
As you may remember, in the fall of 2017, officers forcibly removed a passenger from United Airlines flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville. Following the massive negative public exposure, investors watched in horror as United Airlines hemorrhaged nearly a billion dollars in market cap value.
United Airlines is still flying the skies, but not without a permanently marred reputation. Other companies — smaller ones, or less capably equipped ones — would simply crash and burn in the wake of this kind of reputation disaster.
4. Reputation management is important both for celebrities and businesses
We've mostly focused on reputation management as it applies to businesses thus far, but it’s important for individuals/Celebrities/Public Figures too. It’s an area of interest for the billionaire hedge fund manager attempting to cover up an extramarital dalliance gone public. It’s critical for the singer who accidentally made a big real estate photography mistake even bigger.
Since personalities/celebrities essentially are often businesses, it makes sense that they would benefit from reputation management. Most people in the modern world cannot live their lives in anonymity. If people know your name, they'll Google your name. It’s just what people do.
They're not just Googling your name. They're also reading your business’ reviews and talking about your brand on social media. With all of these different channels at play and, honestly, ways to quickly trash your reputation, it’s essential to take an active stance to show your best side online. The image that is portrayed when your name or company is typed into a search engine can help or harm you. There is often no in between.
Those of us without an outsize personality or billions to our name can afford to manage our reputations ourselves. We're good to go after posting a flattering photo on Facebook, an Instagram post or a resume on LinkedIn that only slightly exaggerates our finer points.
Individuals with more at stake — like a money-making personality or billions to their name — may need to bring in the big guns, hi we’re Honest London… Nice to meet you.
5. Reputation management is a fast-growing industry
As we’ve pointed out, if your reputation is down the tubes, so is your business. In fact, 87% of customers will reverse a purchase decision after viewing negative content about a brand or product online.
It’s no surprise, then, that businesses shell out tens of thousands of dollars a month in an effort to preserve or improve their reputations.
As search engines have all but replaced word-of-mouth referrals, online reputation management has become an industry that purports to exercise massive sway over public opinion. A company’s reputation is its Yelp rating/Google reviews, New York Times takedown or viral Colbert burn. What appears at the top of the search results is what people see, believe and respond to.
Who's in control of your reputation?
Perhaps the most salient reputation management question to answer is Who’s in control of your reputation? This is the single biggest sticking point in understanding reputation management, and it’s a huge reason why reputation mismanagement is so rampant. Misunderstanding this crucial first point leads to a multitude of sins, false steps, confusion, and outright blunders.Let’s answer the question as clearly possible: A brand or individual/celebrity has very limited control over their reputation.
Reputation, as it turns out, is largely out of our hands for the most part. At the risk of being redundant, here’s the definition of reputation management once more:
Reputation management is the effort to influence what and how people think of a brand or person.
At its best, reputation management is only an effort. And note that reputation management helps influence how people think. Shaping someone’s thinking? You can probably come up with a whole lot of reasons why that is A) not a good idea, B) fraught with obstacles and C) nearly hopelessly ineffective
And that’s our point. Reputation management deals in the murky waters of psychology, where cognitive biases, individual perceptions, and past experiences wield enormous power.
What do you control about your reputation?
In terms of your business’s reputation, you control your business’s or personal brands' (your own) actions. And it’s possible that even on that point, your control is limited. Running a business is obviously a large task. Businesses have a lot of moving parts. Many businesses have a lot of employees, each of whom has some degree of autonomy in how they function, what they say and how they live their personal lives.
Though you control some things in running a business, you don’t control everything. You can’t. And that leaves your reputation in the hands (more precisely, the minds) of those who perceive your company.
The actions that you undertake as a business leader do shape reputation in some way. If, for example, you decide to embezzle millions of dollars, put cyanide in your donuts or openly support weapons smugglers, these actions will have a marked impact on your reputation.
What don’t you control about your reputation?
Almost everything. Even if your actions are cautious, circumspect and limited in their scope of impact, your reputation takes on a life of its own in the public mind. There's no controlling it.
To make this point, let’s use a simple example. Let’s say you run a spaghetti restaurant. Quality, sanitation, employee training, recipes, ambiance — you’ve worked hard to make sure that everything is perfect, that your sauce is well-seasoned and that your spaghetti is piping hot when served.
One day, you serve a customer your tastiest spaghetti dish at the normal serving temperature of 113 degrees. The customer, unfortunately, was expecting their plate of noodles to be 119 degrees. Early in life, they had a horrible experience with colder-than-expected pasta, a memory that is now mixed up with being cut off from their family, experiencing poverty and losing their hair. The customer rises up from the table in a rage, accusing you of being the worst spaghetti restaurant in the entire Western Hemisphere, spitting their spaghetti back into the dish, and causing all the other restaurant patrons to gaze at their own noodles with horror and revulsion.
Instantly, your restaurant’s reputation is suspect. Even if the other customers enjoyed the dish, their experience at the restaurant is forever tainted by the customer with some unfortunate life experiences and maladjusted expectations. Your reputation may suffer.
Yes, it’s an extreme example, but the point is you had no idea, let alone control, over the individual with the troubled family history and androgenetic alopecia.
Here’s another example from one of our current celebrity clients: We started seeing on Twitter how awful she is and how she needs to be cancelled… With it being our job to protect her reputation… We were mystified and horrified. We researched to find the source of why this was trending and discovered someone on Reddit wrote a completely fake story of seeing the celebrity client yesterday, how she was incredibly rude and said no to any photos. This did not happen. The celebrity client was with us the entire day. This person simply made up a fake story bored to get ‘Internet Points’, this happened over a year ago and it still lingers over us and we’re still working on fixing it as people still only know her now as having a bad attitude.
Take another example —;the explosion of an engine on a Southwest aircraft.
The incident tragically resulted in the death of one passenger. Upon investigation, it was found that the faulty engine was compromised due to metal fatigue, an issue that was beyond the scope of even the most rigorous routine inspections. Southwest experienced a surge in public interest after the incident.
Search results were only showing the news announcement which was obviously not beneficial to a brand. But how much control did Southwest have over the entire affair — from the metal fatigue to the tragedy itself, to the ongoing investigation and fallout? Very little.
The development of reputation happens in much the same way as the process of communication:
You, as the sender, communicate your reputation through your employees, branding, messaging, web presence and all the other elements of a brand. The receiver, which is any individual in the general public, decodes this message according to the specific channel of communication. Once in the receiver’s mind, the message is layered with all the life experiences, interpretations, biases and other complex issues that affect how a person understands information.
You can see how the communication of a reputation could easily go off the rails at any point in the process.
Reputation is largely outside of your control. As advanced and effective as many reputation management techniques are, it’s not possible to change how people think. Therefore, reputation management focuses on what people see.
What can you control about your reputation?
If you've made it this far, you've probably noticed that your reputation is largely out of your control. However, there are some active steps you can take to attempt to control what people see about you online.
In an effort to maintain a positive online reputation, you can:
Assess your current situation: Start by simply Googling yourself or your brand. Take note of what comes up and whether your search results are mostly positive or negative.
Monitor your search results: Keep a careful watch on what is being said about you online. Respond to comments whether they are positive or negative. If they are negative, work to improve the problem to avoid repeating it in the future.
Create positive content: Focus on the channels you can control (your website, blog, social media pages) to create positive content.
Focus on your brand: Your overall brand is key here. Be transparent, and work from the inside out to make sure that your brand is what you say it is online.
Hire someone like Honest London: We work on your reputation, do all the above and more. We provide advice on how we can improve your image and show you or your brand in its best light. We work to avoid crisis situations but have decades of experience in dealing with them if we have too. We can help cover up negative stories to help your brands online image.
Can reputation be managed?
Can reputation be managed? It’s clear that you cannot control what people think about you or your business. What you can adjust is what people see, which then affects how they perceive you and the reputation they form of you.
So, we offer a qualified yes. Reputation can be managed. To a degree.
The word “managed” conveys a greater degree of control than most reputation management practices can truly affect. Much of what reputation management attempts to do is to adjust a very small scope of reputational issues. Most of these issues are online.
Here are some of the sources of reputation problems that reputation management does attempt to deal with:
Negative news articles – News articles are often the first thing that people see when they Google your business’s name or peruse their news feeds. Even though people are aware that fake news exists, we still tend to believe what we read in the news.
Negative online images – Celebrities and ordinary citizens alike have been the subject of leaked photos. Thankfully, there are legal guidelines that stipulate when such images may be removed from search indexes.
Wikipedia – Wikipedia is the cultural default for information on virtually every conceivable subject. Unfortunately, Wikipedia can be biased and unedited. Reputation management must pay close attention to this site that consistently ranks high in the search engines.
Blog posts – Anyone can write anything they want about anyone they want. The result is a riot of misinformation and confusion. This is another arena in which reputation management can and does exercise substantial impact.
Ripoff reports and scam sites – Like malicious blogs, some review sites are nothing more than conduits of complaint for disaffected consumers (or worse, malicious reputation destroyers). If these reports go mainstream, they can destroy brands.
Review sites – Review sites like Yelp exist to help the consumer make guided choices based on what other customers have experienced. But what if a single malcontented consumer ruins an otherwise great company with a negative review? In an ideal world, the number of good reviews would counteract the outlier, but sometimes a single negative review can shutter a business for good.
Social media – Social media has a shorter shelf life than anything else in this list, but it still matters. Social media is the method of choice for people recommending brands, spreading gossip, airing complaints and criticising public figures.
Search results can linger for years. A single reputation blowup will fester in the search index and in people’s minds for such a long time that the false news ossifies into gospel truth. It lingers, that is, until something changes it. And that’s where the science of reputation management comes into play.
Using techniques from the field of search engine optimisation, cognitive psychology, user behaviour, and human-computer interaction (HCI), reputation management professionals can restore equilibrium back to search results, review sites, information portals and other sources of publicly accessible information.
Reputation can be managed. The scope of management is limited since we can’t control what people think. But we can control what people see online to some extent, and that can go a long way toward preserving a positive reputation and keeping a business alive.
FAQS
How can I monitor my reputation online?
Reputation management is the effort to influence what and how people think of a brand or person when viewed online. There are many different reputation management strategies that will allow you to maintain or improve your online reputation.
You may choose to manage your reputation on your own or with the help of a reputation management company. Either way, you will work to monitor and improve your reputation over time, often starting with improving your search engine results.
Setting up Google Alerts is a great first place to start monitoring your reputation online. You will see when negative news articles, blogs, reviews or images are posted, and what people are saying about you on social media.
What if what I find is bad? How can I improve my online reputation?
Luckily, reputation can be improved over time. But it takes a lot of hard work and consistency to achieve results. If you are facing a full-blown crisis or a bout of negative publicity, there are steps you can take to turn your search results around and rebuild your online reputation.
The road to reputational recovery can be simplified into three steps:
Analyse the damage: Take a moment to assess the extent of the damage. Before you take any actions to respond to the damage, track existing and new press, research what is being said about you, and touch base with any investors or stakeholders.
Regain control: This is the time to turn the situation around. Regaining control often starts with an apology. Issue a statement apologizing for any wrongs that may have been committed, and continue to update the situation as it progresses.
Create a recovery roadmap: Oftentimes simply issuing an apology is not enough to recover from a bad online reputation. Once you’ve done all you can do to immediately try to improve the situation, start thinking about long-term strategies, such as creating and promoting positive content.
How do I choose a reputation management company?
A reputation management company can help improve your reputation faster and more efficiently than if you were to go it alone. An experienced reputation management company will likely have dealt with a similar situation to yours before, and will know exactly what works and what doesn’t to solve the problem.
Here are a few things to consider when choosing a reputation management company:
How many years of experience does the company have?
Do they specialise in the specific area of reputation management you need help with?
Do they deliver exceptional customer service? Will they be available to answer any questions you may have or to deal with crises as they unfold?
Have you researched the company and reviewed their references/testimonials?
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