Why is e-reputation essential for businesses
Corporate e-reputation is the online image of a company.
While the digital is blooming, e-reputation is becoming a strategic issue for most companies. The change in the way we handle and diffuse information makes the monitoring of e-reputation crucial in anticipating the negative or positive impacts of its media exposure.
It is important to avoid mistaking the monitoring of e-reputation with social listening, which are two different process : the idea of “social listening” and “e-reputation monitoring” are often misunderstood, but in reality they are two complementary procedures permitting having a 360° vision of a company’ reputation.
Business intelligence as a tool to protect e-reputation
Monitoring e-reputation is the idea of continuously surveying what is written about company on the internet, also as a way to identify the sources of those posts. It can come from clients, rivals, employees or even influencers. Business intelligence allows to survey all the information sources linked with the activity in the aim of mastering risks and opportunities associated with it. Nevertheless, it is crucial upstream to identify all channels likely to mention the company. After this first diagnostic, it is then possible to launch a business intelligence on the e-reputation.
The objectives of an e-reputation monitoring
Launching a monitoring in order to survey its e-reputation is a real lever to achieve concrete goals :
- Anticipating risks : it allows to prevent potential risks by being informed in real-time of online posts dealing with your company, thus allowing managing effectively before they worsen.
- Detecting opportunities : monitoring e-reputation also permits to discover opportunities for the company, such as new trends or partnership opportunities.
- Following trends : by surveying online posts, it will be possible to follow actual trends and uses of the activity sector, thus adapting a strategy in consequence.
- Following rivals : surveying the activity of its direct rivals is important in order to acquire or keep the competitive advantage.
- Improve the customer experience : by surveying online commentaries and reviews of the company, it will be possible to identify the weaknesses of the customer service and fix them, improving the global customer experience.
- Protect your brand : Finally, monitoring your e-reputation allows to protect the brand by repairing malicious content or intellectual property infringement and quickly acting to make them retire.
In summary, monitoring e-reputation enables the companies to be informed in real-time of what is told about them on the internet, in order to protect their brand by rapidly reacting in case of crisis, handling opportunities and adapting to trends.
How does business intelligence contribute to the protection of e-reputation?
Gathering and analyzing available information online, with an interest on social networks, forums, blogs.
A follow-up of opinions from people that have an important influence online is essential.
Having an action plan well established in order to efficiently handle the situation and limit the potential damages.
What’s the difference between monitoring e-reputation and social listening?
As explained previously the aim of surveying its e-reputation is to protect the company’s reputation by identifying risks and opportunities on time.
Social listening, for its part, consists of monitoring social networks conversations to understand opinions, trends and needs of the consumers. It enable to collect qualitative data about consumers and to understand how they perceive the brand or the products. The aim of social listening is to help companies improving their marketing and communication strategy, based on the users feedback. Consequently, it focuses more on social networks and it can be used as a complement of business intelligence to have a complete vision of e-reputation.
E-reputation monitoring is must-have solution to deal with a online brand image
E-reputation monitoring is a key element to protect the company’s online reputation. By continuously surveying the brand image and the reputation of the company on several sources, you will be able to detect trends and opinions forming about your company. This will allow you to protect your reputation by identifying the risks and the opportunities on time. Thus, it is important to set up a business intelligence strategy in order to efficiently handle the risks linked to e-reputation. It will permit you to rapidly react and put in place necessary measures, in the aim of protecting your online reputation.
