Reputation measurement often gets relegated to a quick review of sentiment, often automated.
But does the application of automated sentiment to a handful of keywords or key phrases really allow organisations to determine how audiences truly see them?
Defining reputation
Business reputation is usually defined as how the public views a corporation. This is a serviceable but not-quite-comprehensive enough description, because there are many factors that contribute to public perception.
If you are only measuring sentiment of a business’s name, you are likely missing other aspects that can impact reputation.
For example, key audiences could love your product but dislike your CEO. Or, your organisation may have a stellar reputation for social responsibility but customer service response time is lacking.
Additionally, you may wish to consider tracking general public response and key audience response. While both can affect your overall reputation, disappointment expressed by key audiences is more likely to have an impact on sales and business goals.
Truly measuring reputation will examine multiple aspects of how a firm is viewed by the public, and will look at both general audience and key audience perceptions.
Using measurement to uncover reputation insights
Tracking each of these areas may require some planning when setting up a measurement program.
First, you will need to assess which aspects of your organisation you believe contribute most significantly to reputation. Some examples are:
- General corporate mentions
- CEO/leadership coverage
- Key audience segments
- Internal/employee satisfaction
- Product mentions
- Customer service
- Accessibility
- Issue involvement
- Charitable work and contributions
You may wish to prioritise some of these topics over others, or monitor for all of them. As a practical matter, focusing on the issue areas where you have either the greatest volumes of coverage or the most vulnerabilities can be an efficient way to start.
Next, determine which types of media are likely to provide the information relevant to what you are tracking. For general corporate mentions, traditional and social media make sense, or you may wish to narrow your review to a priority media list that includes trade publications.
For customer service tracking, social media and corporate contact information will probably yield more relevant information than mainstream media channels, which are less likely to report on individual feedback. For internal tracking, employee surveys make the most sense.
These reputational factors are likely to require different data collection and monitoring processes. Unless time and money are abundant, you may wish to consider focusing on the ones that most directly affect business objectives.
How to track reputation over time
After you have decided which aspects make the most sense to track, you should establish a baseline for each. The only way to determine whether an organisation’s reputation is changing is to measure against a baseline.
Establishing periodic reporting periods, typically monthly and/or quarterly, will help to instil the habit of checking your data. It also means that being on a sufficiently regular interval should help to pinpoint when factors arise that affect reputation.
For example, a product recall may result in a dip in reputation, whilst a discount promotional effort may bolster reputation. Routine reporting will keep these types of events top of mind, allowing for more careful assessment of which have a lasting impact on reputation.
Using insights to affect change
Monitoring for crisis management and tracking mentions are ongoing efforts that are valuable in and of themselves. But most monitoring activities are best at providing insights that allow an organisation to use that information to adjust and improve.
This is true for reputational monitoring, as over time you will begin to see patterns of what events and activities matter to your key audiences.
Adjusting customer service practices based on monitoring to see which responses work best at retaining customers is one example. Analysing service calls and social media responses can help to surface successful messaging, tone, and satisfaction feedback. This in turn can be incorporated into response training, to improve customer service reputation.
Some aspects may help to raise awareness, but might not be quite as actionable. A CEO or other executive speaking about a tough quarter might receive poor press coverage and negative commentary, affecting reputational numbers. However, this is not something that can be addressed or corrected by public relations or communications efforts. Instead, analysis of quarterly data should reflect the impact a tough quarter had on CEO or leadership reputation numbers, and future quarters should examine how long it takes for scores to rebound.
In other words, not all aspects of reputation can be directly addressed with corrective actions, but measuring can let you know when you are on the right path to restoring reputation.
Measuring reputation the right way relies on the key factors of identifying the most important components comprising reputation at your organisation, developing a monitoring programme that accurately gauges what key audiences are thinking, and regularly analysing and reporting results.
With this process in place, corrective actions and future planning will be informed by actual data, rather than assumptions, helping your organisation to achieve improved reputational results over time.
