Communication strategist Ayad Nahas stresses on the importance of safeguarding one's online's reputation.
"Move fast and break things" is a philosophy that many entrepreneurs subscribe to. The idea being: don't wait until it's perfect; launch now and fix it later. For many aspects of business, this is a process that works. Glitches get fixed, tweaks are made, and problems eventually get solved. But for your business's online reputation the "fix it later" approach can result in disaster.
Brand protection is a broad term, as it affects many different aspects of your business presence. Brand reputation assets include your logo, other visual characteristics, packaging, online presence, and any other distinctive marks of your company. In our always-connected world, people google your business before making any purchasing decision. They base their opinions on the content they find, online reviews, your website design, and results from search engine.
Anyone can write anything about you online, typically without consequence. A jealous competitor can anonymously write a critical blog post. An angry client can write a horrible review for your business without recourse. Without any positive content out there to defend against digital attacks, you have no chance of keeping your online reputation clean. While you’re hiding behind privacy settings and unidentifiable usernames, your real name suffers. Anything negative goes undefended, immediately rising to the top of your search results for the whole world to see.
What can be ascertained is that organizations now face huge challenges to managing their reputations in light of the new world with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs. Critics and adversaries don’t need deep pockets and sophisticated resources to quickly impose harm on any organization. With the proliferation of social media, it easy to miss a question, complaint, or a negative review. Every unanswered question or remark could damage your online reputation.
“While you’re hiding behind privacy settings and unidentifiable usernames, your real name suffers.”
Accordingly, any business needs to typically follow 6 crucial steps in order to protect its online reputation.
- Always be well-versed about what people are saying about you by constantly monitoring key social media platforms
- Respond to reviews promptly
- Avoid confrontations with customers
- Always be active on social media by constantly posting relevant content
- Secure your private information
- Trademark any content that is essential to your firm’s existence.
These simple steps are very important for any business to follow as they could be regarded as preemptive measures to shield any firm’s reputation.
Proactivity is the name of the game since we know that perception management is now completely online and one of the key pillars of a successful business is to keep an intact reputation. Accordingly, there is absolutely no room for a reactive approach. The Internet’s popularity won’t be dying down any time soon and everyone should act now to look after their firm’s reputation in order to build a successful future.
What is also absolutely clear is that governments need to help businesses in order to protect them from harmful online content. This has become a global emergency, which needs to be imminently tackled in order to limit social media and online content as conduits to harm, and create chaos within societies.
