Many businesses view public opinion as a window that will break when cracked. This is incorrect. Trust is not a feeling. It is a quantifiable asset of your business.
However, guidance found on the web about how to build trust is incredibly vague. The majority of guides tell you to track mentions and reply to all the reviews. That is not a strategy; it is the bare minimum of customer service.
To manage how people perceive you or your brand, you need an extensive brand reputation strategy and operating model. You need established processes and forms of escalation as well as established response times. If you do not determine the metrics behind your public persona, the market will.
The Gap Between Perception Management and Daily Work
Software blogs have blurred the lines between crisis management and brand building. Misalignment between these areas can be costly. Viewing every negative comment posted online as a crisis means wasting time and resources.
Viewing a systematic, brand-damaging failure as just a poor review results in lost sales. While the market rewards broad reach, businesses need execution details.
Why Vague Advice Fails
An organization can tell a team to change perception, but that is likely to result in nothing happening. The Internet is full of hollow best practices. Effective operating models contain specific data thresholds.
For example, what do you do if your reviews decrease? If your product is perceived positively on search engines, but negatively on social media, how do you proceed? Teams frequently do not know what to do because there are no defined procedures for handling these situations.
An abstract concept of developing trust cannot withstand the pressure created by a cluster of negative reviews that affects sales. Mechanics are needed, not just thoughts.
PR and Daily Tasks Are Different
Public relations represents the overall media picture and a long-term perspective, while management of perception provides the daily influx of data. They are two separate functions and should be treated as such.
Therefore, if you see a sudden decrease in your star ratings on your most important product page, it is not a public relations issue, it is an issue related to the performance of a marketer.
When a company views public relations and marketing as the same thing, it results in the application of slow response times associated with public relations to a fast-paced digital opportunity.
Therefore, the company's ability to respond in a timely manner has been inhibited, and the company's response will only serve to elevate the original issue for additional scrutiny.
Three Things That Decide If People Buy From You
While you cannot control everything people are saying, you can control how you respond to users. When users are searching for an answer to their question, they are typically in a specific situation at that time.
Examples include a founder's event changing the public's perception of a business, a product launch requiring protection from potential competitors, or the competition actively attacking your brand via social media.
Three things determine whether you will be successful or fail during these situations:
Catching Problems Quickly
Your ability to detect problems is your ability to respond to them. As new negative communications build momentum through social media, review boards, or search engine results, they will cause significant destruction to your sales pipeline if they are not detected quickly enough.
Therefore, the first thing you should do if you suspect a potential negative situation is to set up a notification system that acts as the foundation of your brand reputation strategy, allowing for automated alerts.
Second, you should have a clear understanding of when the negative conversation began to gain traction; if you do not, you will not be able to mitigate the damage sufficiently.
Controlling Your Message Everywhere
As negative messages flow across various platforms (search engines, social media feeds, and review boards), you need to control the narrative across all of these channels. It is often helpful to create messaging related to each individual channel.
A single overall corporate message rarely works effectively on all channels; therefore you need to develop specific messaging for each channel. For example, a response to a complaint on a review board will appear very robotic and defensive when viewed in the social media realm.
Channel control is knowing how to navigate the environment of each platform you publish to or engage with.
How Long Does It Take to Win Back Trust?
When trust is lost due to a negative event—whether that event be a founder creating a public crisis, or a launch of a defective product—a timeline is needed for rebuilding credibility.
Simply saying you are sorry to the public is not enough; you will need to monitor your return to baseline metrics for weeks and months. Rebuilding credibility is a long process requiring a continual return to market of positive data.
A Step-by-Step Plan to Manage How People See You
There is no quick fix to your public image. You will need to create a strategy over a period of three months. In these three months, you will also phase out of the abstract phase of your business model to operationalize your business model into strictly definable operational controls.
Your step-by-step brand reputation strategy gives your teams the benefit of understanding so they are not overwhelmed by the amount of data they receive.
Days 1 to 30
Your first month is an audit of your digital real estate. You cannot successfully manage what you do not measure. This will include auditing every digital asset you own or influence.
You will need to find your baseline sentiment score. You will need to calculate your average mentions per week. You will need to review your historical review velocity. This is also when you want to check for any inconsistencies in the positioning of each digital asset.
For example, if your European team is using a different message than your American team, you will want to resolve this issue in this time. Create a reputation audit checklist for all digital assets; leave no assets unexamined.
Days 31 to 60
Month two will be dedicated to the technology of your workflow. You will want to connect all of your customer relationship management systems to your social monitoring systems.
Next, you will need to very clearly define who has the final say on responses to reviews, who has the ultimate say in terms of approving crisis language, and, in the event that there is a crisis that escalates, who will be the final decision maker about how to respond to that crisis.
This will also be the time frame for removing bottlenecks. Approval delays can create more problems than the initial negative event itself. You must develop templates to define both good practice and bad practice responses.
Days 61 to 90
The third month is focused on building scale and aligning your internal teams. You will create training using real-world examples. It is important to bring together support, HR, and marketing teams in the same space.
Internal alignment is critical. Employee satisfaction correlates with public perception. Engaged and satisfied employees are 20% more productive than unengaged employees. This difference is evident to the public in every interaction.
The Tools You Need for Your Strategy
Tracking thousands of mentions on a spreadsheet is not practical. Therefore, it is important to have a specific tool set created based on the risk level to either your business or product.
The end goal is to centralize the reputation data, allowing multiple teams to utilize it without the risk of misunderstanding.
Tools to Track What People Say
You will need a set of social listening tools. Hootsuite, Brandwatch, Mention, and Emplifi are systems that take raw data from social media sources and determine where your company is mentioned, even if you were not tagged.
These systems also identify competitor attacks on your company. The best tool for your business should depend on the volume of mentions. If you are receiving very few mentions, there is no reason to purchase a more advanced monitoring tool.
If you are doing business worldwide, you should invest in an enterprise-level sentiment-analysis tool to capture the subtleties of different languages and detect sarcasm.
Systems to Store Your Brand Files
Consistent visuals create a subconscious trust with your target audience. The use of digital asset management systems ensures that every team has access to the same logos, tone guidelines, and brand assets.
If the visual elements of your brand are not complete and consistent, it confuses the marketplace and diminishes your authority as a brand.
When regional offices use an incorrect brand color or an outdated logo on their responses to the public, they are communicating that there is an industry-wide lack of consistency and trust within the company.
Once implemented, a digital asset management system will provide your company or organization with a systematic and organized way to manage your visual identity.
Clear Rules for When to Step In
Do not rely on individuals' discretion for responding to customers. Use metrics as part of your escalation process.
No team can be responsive to every inquiry, so establish threshold limits on what types of inquiries will be addressed and what types of inquiries will be ignored.
Response Time Goals: Responses to customer complaints via social channels will occur within two hours, and reviews on standard platforms will be addressed and responded to within 24 hours.
Sentiment Threshold: If the ratio of positive sentiment to negative sentiment drops by more than 15% within one week, the issue will automatically be escalated to the marketing director.
Review Volume Threshold: If the monthly review volume of a product is less than 10 reviews, a marketing email will be automatically sent to customers who purchased the product.
Crisis Escalation: Any mention of legal action, physical harm, or significant compliance failure will bypass standard customer support procedures and trigger an instant alert to the company's legal department.
Dealing with Groups of Bad Reviews
A sudden wave of negative feedback on your product usually indicates a possible design flaw in the product's functionality, packaging process, overnight shipping delays, etc. Therefore, don't just respond to the negative review.
Find out the root cause of the negative review. Take the information contained in the reviews to implement changes within the operational or design teams. The best response to a negative review is to fix the underlying issue before responding with a response.
When Competitors Attack
If you notice that a direct competitor is attacking you via social media, don't start throwing around emotions. Always use data to aid in your response. If the attack does not appear to be gaining traction, do nothing.
Engaging typically just magnifies what others are doing. If your share of voice is being impacted, create and share targeted content that illustrates your value, but do not name your competitor directly. Focus the discussion back onto your strengths.
Tracking Numbers That Show How Much People Trust You
Measuring perception as an important KPI is just as important as measuring revenue or other financial KPIs. Metrics for measuring perception must be tied to the end result for the business. Without using numbers to quantify the strategy, the strategy is merely a wish.
Tracking Reviews and Feelings
Measuring review velocity and sentiment score is a very basic way of measuring consumer engagement. A star rating is simple, and a sentiment score looks at the content of a review and/or social media post, analyzes it, and assigns either a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment towards that piece of content.
Therefore, to gain the best understanding of your customers, you should track review and sentiment scores weekly. The review velocity also provides insight into how fast you are gathering new reviews. A high star rating with a low velocity can look out of date or suspicious to potential customers.
Checking How Often People Talk About You
Share of voice and volume of mentions show how much of the conversation in your industry is yours. If there are 10,000 people talking about your category and only 500 of them mention you, then your share of voice is only five percent.
Thus, you need to actively try to raise this percentage against your competitors. Furthermore, by measuring the volume of mentions, you will know if your current campaigns are breaking through the noise or simply going unnoticed.
How Fast You Answer and Fix Problems
Response time and rate of resolution are critical. By responding quickly to minor issues, you can prevent the spread of these minor problems into major issues that grab the public's attention.
You must therefore track how long it takes your team to respond to customers and then track the percentage of those public replies that led to a private resolution of the issue.
No matter how many people respond, if you aren't actually addressing the underlying customer issue, then a high level of response is meaningless.
Getting Your Team on the Same Page
Your external perception reflects how your internal organization actually operates. Marketing cannot resolve a failed product. PR cannot disguise poor customer service. You need to integrate the departments that communicate with the public.
Every department must use one rule book. On launch day for a product, should there be criticism, the support staff and PR staff should provide exactly the same information.
You should have centralized response templates and keep them current. The public sees discrepancies immediately if your social media person says one thing and your email support person says another.
As part of your preparation for failure modes, you should perform practice drills. What will happen if your software goes down for six hours? What happens if an executive makes a negative statement on social media?
You should chart these scenarios before they occur. Write the template responses before a crisis occurs, and get legal approval now, not during a crisis.
During an actual event, you will not have sufficient time to create a flawless response. By preparing ahead of time, you will be able to produce a faster response to a crisis.
Final Thoughts on Earning Trust
Building trust is an engineering problem instead of an art project. You must develop a software solution, create the supporting infrastructure, and continuously measure its progress.
Successful companies maintain their good public image through careful monitoring of all mentions in the public domain, enforcing response times, and connecting their PR activities directly to their everyday marketing results.
When you take the emotional aspect out of managing your reputation, it becomes data-driven. An effective brand reputation strategy monitors sentiment scores, manages consistency across multiple channels, and prepares specific responses for defined failure modes.
Ultimately, the objective should not be merely to project an image but also to create a predictable system to shield your revenue stream from rapid changes in the public's perception of you. When the underlying system is built correctly, credibility is an ongoing asset.