Reputation milestones
Wise people and systematic companies always have their finger on the pulse assessing parameters of their reputation regularly. Because too many risks arise in the information age and these risks have significant and painful consequences for the business. And in order to assess reputation management’s quality it is not sufficient and non-informative to focus all the attention on:
- what reputation the company has at the moment
- how charismatic and efficient the PR director is.
First, because there is no good or bad reputation but there is target or non-target one. That is, there can be reputation that helps to achieve the set aims and the one that does not help but rather stands in the way. Or there can be fragile reputation that is broken by the very first information attack, and antifragile reputation that only grows stronger under the influence of external stressors.
Second, because today it is a far cry from the days when reputation management came down to communicating with journalists. Due to social networks the world is transparent as can be; a manager or even an owner of a business can be reached by one click if the approach is right. And an average employee’s post on a popular account can have a greater meaning than an official press-release. Thus a personal factor has lost its former meaning and it makes sense to assess the quality of the reputation management system. And it should be done in an integrated manner rather than according to some aggregated indices.
For example, the Rating of Corporate Reputation Management Quality is based on:
- objective characteristics of business functioning that are the foundation for gaining target reputation. Because a company takes care of what image it has created in the public eye by the very fact of its honest work and respect for its stakeholders;
- continuity of efforts made to forge target reputation. Just because there is a joke that has a grain of joke in it:
Tourists admiring an ideal English lawn ask a gardener:
- What is the secret of laying out this wonderful lawn?
- It’s very simple. You should just mow it once a week.
- Just once a week?
- Right. For 200 years.
- presence in the media. Because a high-quality systematic work on reputation always leaves an “imprint” on the information space. And if an approach is right, spacing of the signal does not only guarantee “weaving” of this or that message but also its replication following a virus pattern.
- out-of-the-box PR solutions. Because they testify that managers of corporate reputation choose the road less traveled and care about their job.
- an honest approach to CSR (corporate social responsibility). Because bright-eyed welfare campaigns are not CSR but corporate hypocrisy. Social responsibility consists in high-quality satisfying the needs of customers, in fair treatment of partners and employees. And responsibility can be considered truly social only if the society benefits from it but not only the company’s image does.
- an ability to react to arising reputational risks and force majeure situations appropriately. Because it is a feature of both the collective IQ of reputational managers and consistency of PR work due to which an anti-crisis safety bag was created well in advance.
- economic viability. Great competence is not necessary to use a great budget without clear KPIs It is much more difficult to use not that big money so wisely as to get extra benefits compared to the competitors who treat reputation management less seriously.
We can choose different indices to characterize the mentioned above parameters. The main thing is their amount has to be optimized and their information value highest. What is even more important is to base reputation management on corresponding principles. Because the right outlook in management processes rightfully means the right choice of both messages, and technologies, and instruments.
http://forbes.net.ua/woman/1391134-reputacionnye-orientiry
Tags: Business; Management; Reputation; Work