7 tips for online reputation management
Your company’s reputation is a fragile thing, especially when you’re seeking angel finance. It can take a lifetime to build and a moment to destroy – just ask Gerald Ratner! Speak to anyone about this jewellery mogul, and the first thing they’ll remember is the speech that destroyed his career. Two last-minute joke entries to his speech in front of 5,000 members of the Institute of Directors, and seven years of success and achievement that saw his family’s loss-making business rocket to become the world’s biggest jeweller were at an end.
‘Reputation’ opens doors, it builds brands and it creates business success stories, so if your business is at a stage where it is seeking the assistance of angel finance, your reputation and that of your business needs to be whiter than white. People have a strange habit of remembering the bad and glossing over the good, so if your reputation is tarnished in any way through word or deed, it can have a direct and severe effect on your bottom line well into the future.
As well as being the year of Ratner’s ill-fated speech, 1991 was also the year that the World Wide Web was launched, the browser-accessed system that has revolutionised the way we interact with one another. Today we live much of our lives in front of computers, and business without the Internet seems unimaginable for many of us. But with the elegant simplicity of this global communication tool comes the threat of online reputation issues that need to be managed if your business is ever to achieve the angel finance it needs.
Small to medium-sized businesses are still growing, despite the recession. There are plenty out there that buck the trend and strive to do better and think bigger, but with the banking system in disarray they are turning to angel finance to fund their expansion plans. Those offering angel finance will want to see a well-run business with prospects, and your reputation is something they will be very interested in. With the advent of the Web it has become easier than ever for an employee, shareholder, competitor or disgruntled individual to sully your good name and threaten your angel finance options, so you need a strategy to maintain your online persona.
We’ve come up with a seven-step strategy, in basic terms, to handle such a situation:
- Stay calm – A bit like the message on the cover of Douglas Adams’s creation The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which stated in big friendly letters the helpful advice “Don’t Panic!”, your first reaction to an attack on your online reputation should be to stay calm. How you react in difficult situations is something that investors and those offering angel finance will look at closely. So the last thing you want to do is to go off half-cocked.
- Establish the motive of the perpetrator – What was said, why did they say it, was there any truth to it, etc.? As Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy.” It is essential that you gather as much information on the person, people or organisation that have attacked your company and discover the story behind the situation, as this may help in resolving the matter. It is a dirty tactic but not unheard-of that a competitor aware of your interest in expansion through angel finance could attempt to thwart you by attacking your online reputation.
- Discover the extent of the problem – How far has the news spread and what is the public opinion of the impact this will have on your business, i.e. do people believe it, and what is the projected effect on your business profits? If you heard that someone said something in a blog that had 100 visitors a year you might have less cause to worry than if the website of a national newspaper took up the story and syndicated it to many others.
- Assess the opportunity for spin – Not all bad news has to be bad for a company. There is often a way of turning it around into a positive that can boost your reputation.
- Decide whether an official response is warranted – Not every bit of bad news necessitates a response. Sometimes to respond can inflame a reaction that far outreaches any damage the original story could have caused, and at other times it can validate news that otherwise would have disappeared without a trace.
- Back up your position – If you are going down the route of an official response, you need a watertight argument backed up by facts and figures, testimonials and expert evidence. The research you did into the whys and wherefores before you reacted can now pay dividends if you are looking to minimise the impact on your business or crush the credibility of a story.
- Back to business as usual – The longer you let something like this affect your business, the more successful the perpetrator has been. It is therefore vitally important to put this all behind you as quickly as possible and get back to business as usual.
Angel finance is difficult enough to achieve under normal circumstances, but when your reputation is under attack angel finance can be next to impossible to find unless you can stamp the attack out quickly and prove that you have minimised any impact on your company’s profits.
Follow these few steps and you’ll be far better prepared to weather the reputation storm.
