Reputation is Everything! Oh and we’ve been featured in ‘Your Business’ Magazine

Reputation is everything – it’s the trust your consumers have for your brand. If your reputation is damaged, it can be overwhelming and devastating. Nowadays, your company’s ongoing success is dependent on understanding what your consumers want and how it’s communicated online plus demonstrating best practice around online safety and trust. Taking time to review and prepare for potential risks can be the difference between success, or forking out the £££s to salvage your reputation.

Online reputation management requires a deft hand when it comes to your digital brand persona. It involves strategically thinking through a multitude of areas including: messaging tone, engagement, support, safety and responsibility. You must take into consideration your people, your audience, current events, divisive topics, and more. And this isn’t something you present once and leave – it takes constant review, and improvement.

In addition to managing brand reputation, history has proven how vital it is for every company – big or small, established or new – to understand and prepare for a potential brand crisis. Incorporating risk management and moderation as part of your business strategy should be considered just as important as your marketing and social media strategies. Every business executive understands the importance of having the best brand marketing team for its product, however, it’s equally important to cultivate your public-facing culture, behaviour and tone of voice; including how you plan to communicate with your audience in good times, and bad.

Overall, we’ve found that the most successful online businesses all incorporate the same 5 key actions into their social and digital strategies. Below we outline our expert advice for a successful online social presence:

1. Double-check your online marketing strategies with your online support vendor. This will help everyone better prepare for the inevitable customer questions and criticisms.
2. Listen to your community team – they are the advocates for the people that are buying your products and know what they want, and don’t want!
3. Know your rights and your audience. Moderation and guidelines for engagement shouldn’t be an afterthought. They’re there to protect you, and your customers. They should be fair across the board, and you will want to consider revisiting them regularly as society, and your product, changes.
4. Have a crisis plan in place. Your social media moderation/community management agency are experts in crisis management – listen to them and work together to create ‘what if the worst happens’ best practices. This will likely reduce the amount of late night calls and freaked out staff feeling nervous about what to do.
5. Leave the work to the experts. It’s taken us many years to understand the subtle nuances of online community and social media management. Not only that, but we work hard to ensure your teams can leave at the end of the day, trusting their work is in the right hands.

How much time and attention do you give to what happens after your marketing plan goes live and you get actual feedback from your audience at large? And, what if something goes wrong and your brand is targeted?

For more information about what StrawberrySocial brings to your brand protection table, check out this article in the most recent Your Business Magazine or contact us here.

Check out our services:

Community Management and Customer Support

Charity Support

Social Strategy Support