Keeping Your Reputation in Check

According to “Measure What Matters,” your reputation is the sum of all of your relationships with the public. What people can see publicly and make judgements on you or your brand based on what they see or hear. Word of mouth can either be a big reputation builder or it can be a reputation killer and the same goes for social media. If you aren’t careful and monitoring what is being sad, a bad tweet or post can singlehandedly ruin your reputation if you don’t put a stop to it and this is where measurement comes in handy.

Measurement should cover “print, TV, radio, online news, blogs, Facebook trends, tweets, YouTube videos, Flickr sets, social bookmarks, etc.”, according to Katie Paine This may seem like a lot but the technology we have today makes it easy to track these things all at once. The reason for there being so many things to track is just tracking Google searches and tweets won’t help you. If you’re looking to improve your business, build a good reputation or stop a bad one from forming, you have to listen to your customers. Interact with them whether it be on social media, forums, message boards or in person because you will be building relationships and simultaneously building your reputation and people will take notice of your actions.

Any time you ask someone what a good quality of a leader, company, friend, significant other, etc. is, most of the time the answer is trust. Trust is huge in business and it is a big deal to people and rightfully so. Why would you go into business or shop somewhere you didn’t trust? Trust can do many things for a business such as; build relationships with donors, bring in more employees, increase the company’s ability to grow and trust can shut down crisis and avoid rumors faster than someone measuring content posted can.

There are many things keeping your reputation built up and growing as a business. It is all about good practice, following your mission and measuring what people say about you so you can handle it properly. It goes without saying trust is a big factor and all of these things can help build trust in one way or another and the more people trust you, the better off you will be in the long run.