What are people talking about? Are you attracting too much criticism? What does this mean to your competitors? Are you responding to negative attention proactively and as soon as possible? You see everyone has the legal right to hold opinions without interferences and express these through any media. And when you notice negative online behaviour against you and your business that threatens the reputation, what measures do you take to restore it?

Consider these cases:

KFC and the shortage of fowl, February 2018

The fowl shortage due to delivery issues after KFC switched its contract to DHL, forced it to close more than half of its 900 stores in UK, resulting in loyal customers venting out furiously on social and mainstream media. Angry customers called the police and some even went to their local politicians. Between all the struggle to re-open the restaurants, KFC managed to turn around a witty, humorous, and authentic response that was applauded by its customers and media for clever handling of the crisis situation and KFC’s response became a model crisis response. It ran an apology advertisement that was too funny and was tailored around its core younger customers.

American Airlines and automated mishap, February 2013

American Airlines brings the lesson that automated response tweets can be inaccurate and wrong crisis measure when responding to customers, especially the angry ones. The issue was that American Airlines responded with a “thank you for your support” message rather than offering an apology. This added insult to injury and made the company look stupid before all internet to see that it uses automated tweets for customer service experience.

Microsoft’s innocent Tay tweeted uncool things, March 2016

Microsoft’s Twitter bot Tay, the experiment to understand conversations and engage people, unfortunately, went corrupt within 24 hours of its launch and the worst tweets were the ones heavily circulated. Tay started repeating phrases and tweeted some very uncool things. It was a case of technology taking a wrong turn. But Microsoft reacted quickly, deleted some of the offensive tweets, suspended the project and officially apologized on their blog.

Nestle vs Greenpeace, 2010

Nestle faced barrage of criticism by not addressing the negative comments about their palm oil sourcing practices, and instead of responding by deleting people’s posts from their FB Fan Page followed by posting a message, “To repeat: we welcome your comments, but don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic—they will be deleted.” This led to an angry online mob effect and increased a huge pressure on the brand. A few months later Nestle announced it would stop sourcing unsustainable palm oil – a huge victory for Greenpeace.

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Gitlab’s Data Crisis, January 2017

Gitlab’s Software developers accidentally removed client’s data from the primary data server and Gitlab’s service wasn’t available for 18 hours which was totally unacceptable to its clients such as IBM, Alibaba, Sony, O’Reilly Media, CERN, Invincea, Jülich Research Center and Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ) whose code was deleted. Gitlab managed this crisis by announcing about the incident, then giving an explanation on why this happened and how they are going to fix it, and then asking the professional community to help. They restored access to the data in a live format and welcomed everyone to the online event. Gitlab’s crisis was taken as a challenge and large-scale community was happy to help. The issue was solved.

Of course, there are many more examples we could have cited, but we look at what can be done to manage ORM.

Reputation management generally involves these:

• Assessment of reputation in multiple areas – contextual, financial, quantitative – in comparison with peers. This can be done through a detailed and structured analysis of media, surveys, opinion polls, focus groups
• Putting people in charge for reputation monitoring, evaluation, reporting and management of reputational risks
• Deploy automated processes for scanning of Social media, Blogs, Websites, App reviews, SEO techniques and consumer management. There are many ORM tools available.
• Gain good understanding on core audience – who and where are they, what they are likely to think about the brand during brand’s tough time
• Know brand’s promise, positioning and voice
• Understand what can make or breakcore audience’s trust in the brand, based on how it responds to crisis.
• Monitor social media channels effectively, to be able to react quickly and appropriately.
• This may not work for everyone, but depending on your industry, communication with your audience and asking for help could turn public opinion in your favour.
• Beliefs and expectations keep evolving and hence should be monitored through periodic surveys and in-depth interviews to ascertain whether the gap between reputation and reality is materializing or widening
• Don’t just go ahead and offer an apology. Understand the real problem first.
• Do not sound robotic or like a press release. Let your statements speak from heart politely.
• It’s not just about reacting well. But be proactive and plan ahead. Not just when you come across an ORM crisis to deal with.
• Make efforts to build trust with the audience. It turns out useful during the crisis.
• Monitor your Google page 1 and you have a reason to worry about if negative words are associated with your brand.
• Understand the criticism from the audience. It could be constructive and may groom your text messages.
• Take action on illegitimate attackers who post false information in defamatory language to damage the company’s reputation. Else wise they will do it again.
• Learn from mistakes and failures. Control failures from happening and do not repeat mistakes.

These are not times of passive reputation. The world is online. People are googling all the time, getting influenced and taking decisions by what they find on search and social. In all likelihood, the results are average but things can go bad really fast before you get complete understanding and control on the situation.

If you have questions on reputation management or you need help with ORM services, our experts are always here for you. Talk to our team today.