ReportWire

Tag: Company Reputation

  • How to Get Your Online Image (and Reviews) Back on Track | Entrepreneur

    How to Get Your Online Image (and Reviews) Back on Track | Entrepreneur

    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Much like client-focused specialists in any industry, financial services professionals depend mainly on the perception and level of trust surrounding their name, particularly when generating business and keeping pace with the competition.

    Your financial services reputation not only engenders the credibility needed to attract new prospects but strengthens trust and loyalty among existing clients, ensuring they look to your company for guidance, advice and, ultimately, value over the long haul.

    Building a trustworthy reputation in the financial services industry begins with a solid, proven approach to customer service and client communications. But in the digital age, it must also include a coordinated and strategic accounting of your online presence, especially the online reviews, platforms, and digital profiles consumers use to research your company.

    Below, I explore best practices to help you uphold your company’s reputation and foster trust among clients and across the financial services field.

    Prioritize transparency and clear communication

    Focusing on effective and open client communications sets the stage for a strong brand reputation, providing a solid foundation for positive, lasting client relationships. Prioritizing clear and transparent communication at all touchpoints is essential for nurturing trust and reinforcing the sense of reliability clients need to stick around for the long term.

    Whether it’s discussing financial strategies, explaining terms and conditions, or providing updates on investments, it’s crucial your clients fully understand the information you’re conveying. It also helps to avoid using industry jargon (when possible) and encourage questions that facilitate open dialogue. More often than not, a healthy client-advisor relationship can only survive when communication is clear, complete, and convenient.

    Related: 5 Examples of Companies Succeeding Through Transparency

    Set realistic expectations

    Setting realistic expectations at the outset is essential for managing client perceptions of your services and your advisory firm. Instead of overpromising or guaranteeing unrealistic returns, it’s critical to be honest about potential risks and rewards associated with different investment options right from the beginning.

    In my experience, clients who feel informed and confident about what you’re doing and how you’re pursuing their objectives are generally far more likely to trust your advice and remain loyal to your company. They’re also much likelier to speak positively about your company among loved ones and across online review platforms.

    Be timely and responsive

    There are few financial services companies, or firms of any industry, for that matter, that are immune to client complaints, especially with so many online platforms for consumers to air their grievances.

    When faced with a bad review or complaint, it’s crucial to approach the situation professionally and from the client’s point of view. Even if the client’s account of things doesn’t really add up, actively listening to their concerns, being apologetic, and working toward a prompt resolution tend to be the best ways to mitigate the issue and prevent it from getting worse down the line.

    Replying to reviews politely and with a solutions-based mindset can turn a negative experience into a positive one. And when that exchange is done online, it has the potential to show others you take the client experience seriously and will do whatever is needed to make things right.

    Seek out feedback whenever possible

    It may not seem intuitive, but encouraging clients to provide feedback on their experience with your financial services company can be an effective way to combat negative feedback and boost your rating across online review sites. When done right, actively seeking feedback at critical client touchpoints – and on your terms – helps reduce future surprises from popping up in the online review process while allowing you to better steer the brand conversation in your favor.

    You can request feedback in any number of ways, including through surveys, follow-up emails, or one-on-one discussions. Actively listen to their suggestions, comments, and concerns, and continually use this feedback to improve your services. Demonstrating a commitment to listening and improving based on client input can bolster your company’s reputation.

    Leverage client testimonials to your advantage

    Positive client testimonials provide a compelling tool for promoting your value and strengthening your financial services reputation. Testimonials offer invaluable social proof that tends to resonate with consumers, and sharing that glowing feedback on your website, in marketing materials, and across social media channels is a great way to maximize its impact on your audience and your brand. Spreading the word by promoting authentic testimonials helps build credibility and instill confidence in prospects seeking your expertise.

    Related: Make Customer Testimonials Meaningful

    Monitor online reviews carefully

    Responding to online complaints and proactively requesting reviews can be powerful ways to boost your online ratings. Yet, these methods are just one piece of the reputation and review management puzzle. Tracking reviews and other online threats on sites like Google, Yelp, and industry-focused platforms is critical to identifying and mitigating new reputation risks swiftly.

    Showcase your expertise

    Showcasing your expertise and thought leadership online doesn’t just position you as your area’s go-to financial services pro. It also solidifies your credibility, providing a reputational firewall of positive, professional content that promotes your value while helping to shield brand integrity from negativity and online threats.

    So, how do you spotlight your credentials and bulk up your reputation in the process? These days, thought leadership is built online by sharing valuable insights and educational content through articles, blog posts, interviews, and videos across high-authority channels that support and elevate your position. By promoting your expertise through high-value content and doing so consistently, you can continually build and reinforce your industry authority while attracting new clients.

    Building a positive reputation, especially in the financial services space, takes a commitment not just to prioritizing an exceptional client experience but proactively managing your online presence. Combining a robust client service model with a comprehensive approach to managing online reviews, profiles, and thought leadership is critical to cultivating the trust, loyalty, and business your advisory firm needs to thrive.

    Adam Petrilli

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  • What to Do When a Personal Brand Clashes With Corporate Reputation | Entrepreneur

    What to Do When a Personal Brand Clashes With Corporate Reputation | Entrepreneur

    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Personal branding is experiencing a universal moment. We are seeing people from all walks of life building their visibility, promoting themselves both online and offline. Once reserved for those of us looking to monetize side gigs, personal branding has since become a mainstream endeavor. Research shows that people who are “able to discover their own points of competitive differentiation and creatively turn them into compelling narrative and imagery, while doing that strategically and socially-appropriately, have greater chances of professional success.” A personal brand can open doors to internal mobility, unlock new career opportunities and even lead to greater career satisfaction.

    Employees from all walks of life are following the likes of Gary Vee to learn how to build their own personal brands and leverage social media effectively. And yet, many are fearful and hesitant. They are fearful not only of doing it wrong thus damaging their careers, but they are actually concerned that their pursuit of increased visibility will ring loud alarm bells across the HR team and the executive offices of the company that employs them. No surprise there! Disparaging language when discussing personal branding continues to prevail. Look at this BBC article which refers to personal branding as an act of “touting oneself,” in turn positioned as being at odds with company loyalty. Talk about being out of touch with modern reality.

    Related: How to Understand Corporate Branding vs. Personal Branding for Success

    The tension between personal branding and corporate fallout

    Articles with their disparaging language aside, employers’ concerns can definitely be worthy of empathy. After all, employee-related scandals can easily go viral, whether it’s in the private or the public sectors. In the era of social media and our shared love for a juicy story with a dramatic plot twist, what an employee says or does can quickly come under scrutiny and even quicker cast a shadow on the employer and their reputation. As a result, organizations are crafting what they believe to be iron-clad social media policies, blocking access to social media platforms from office equipment and quite frankly employing some of the stringiest methods aimed at mitigating potential reputational risk.

    This tension between personal branding and corporate fallout isn’t unique to the cubicles of corporate America. Even sectors that traditionally thrive on individual expression, such as the entertainment industry, are not immune to the challenges and pitfalls of personal branding.

    Cue in the most recent Disney drama surrounding the Snow White remake of its age-old classic. News outlets and vloggers across the continent are sharing clips of the actor hired to play Snow White positing that her off-putting demeanor, unlikeable behavior and questionable statements are damaging the movie’s chances of box-office success. Here we’ve got an actor speaking her mind and freely expressing her opinions about the remake versus the original version, expressing her disdain for the original and feeling that she is doing her best to promote the remake. In her mind, she is likely simply sharing how wonderful the new version is going to be. Yet, as a result, Disney’s executives are predicted to be having emergency meetings to damage control. A clear case of a personal brand gone rogue!

    Related: Why Investing in Reputation Management is Crucial for Your Business Strategy

    So, what can we learn from this?

    What policy can we draft as employers, or how can we make sure that our own personal brands are not blamed for the reputation crises of our employers?

    The simple answer is this: We cannot.

    You see, unless we condone the cancellation of the First Amendment right and believe that people must be censored for the greater good of their employers, these situations will continue to occur. But here are some tips to try and reduce the probability of this happening to you:

    1. Hire for shared values and not only for skill: Assemble a team that resonates with your organization’s ethos. Their alignment with your values is key to ensuring their personal brand doesn’t diverge from your organizational identity. And when you are looking for a job, do the same: Look to join an organization that shares your values and will thus be likely to align with your actions and behaviors.

    2. Be crystal clear with your brand positioning and your point of view, both as a corporate brand and through your personal brand: A well-defined brand narrative serves as a guiding star. When employees’ personal brands harmonize with your corporate identity, it’s a win-win. At the core of any brand — corporate or personal — lies a very clearly defined point of view.

    3. Don’t fight your employees’ personal brand-building efforts, but rather invest in training them to do it right: Educate your team about the nuances of personal branding. With the right training, they can navigate the digital landscape adeptly, projecting their individuality while safeguarding your brand’s reputation.

    Related: 7 Ways to Recover After a Reputation Crisis

    Most reputation crises occur because of a faux pas. These can be reduced, or perhaps even avoided entirely, through media training for your higher visibility employees and social media training for your whole team. Personal branding is here to stay and, as an employer, you can derive a multitude of benefits from having high-profile employees. They can help attract higher-caliber hires to your organization, as well as high-ticket clients. You should embrace your team members’ visibility and derive the value but equip them to do it right and to avoid saying or doing something that can be damaging both to you and to them.

    Personal branding is experiencing a universal moment, and it is not something we can curb. Let’s instead devise a strategy that will allow our employees’ personal narratives to unfold in harmony with our organizations’ tales, making for a story that captivates, rather than a subplot that becomes our demise.

    Marina Byezhanova

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  • 5 Reputation Strategies I Learned While Working with Celebrities | Entrepreneur

    5 Reputation Strategies I Learned While Working with Celebrities | Entrepreneur

    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    C’mon, is there anyone out there who doesn’t think Kim K. and Pete D. were a curated love affair? Hollywood is full of set-up relationships and staged situations aimed at one goal: garner media attention. And the more attention, the better, because increased media attention translates directly to increased dollar value.

    Brand image is everything to a celebrity’s career. When the image is positive, it can influence everything from box office share to book sales, from what tequila flies off the shelves to what paint color is all the rage. One utterance of a coined term can go viral within hours. One sighting of a piece of clothing on a certain someone can catapult a design star overnight.

    But when a celebrity brand takes a hit, it can be devastating. It isn’t always — some reputations prove more resilient than others, but if the damage is great enough, fans and followers will knock you off the pedestal as quickly as they hoisted you up there.

    In my 15-year career in PR, I’ve worked with various celebrity types, including influencers, A-listers and corporate bigwigs. A crisis can pop up at any time, especially in today’s hypersensitive cancel culture, and that’s when more than just a hastily tweeted apology or lying low for a while is called for. That’s when it’s time for a crisis expert to step in with some strategic moves that have the power to move the needle in the direction you want it to go.

    Here are some of the tried-and-true methods that have gotten my clients out of hot water when it threatens to scald their reputations permanently.

    Related: Why Investing in Reputation Management is Crucial for Your Business Strategy

    1. There’s always a scapegoat

    In every narrative, there has to be a villain. And your job is to make sure the villain isn’t your client. Case in point: When I handled a celebrity divorce, the famous one, my client (the husband), was getting raked over the coals for some silly choices and behaviors — he seemed like the bad guy in the story, but really, his not-well-known wife was the one cheating.

    We documented everything meticulously and were able to back up our claims of her infidelity; in the process, we pointed the blame where blame was due and salvaged his career. We didn’t make the wife the scapegoat; she was the scapegoat. But the public didn’t know that until we told a more accurate story than the one that was initially circulated.

    Related: How to Turn Failures Into Wins As an Entrepreneur

    2. Someone is pulling the strings for the other party, so you’d best have someone doing the same on your side

    People work hard to build a life, a name or a brand. An insurance policy is needed to ensure they don’t lose it all at the whim of public fodder. A publicity specialist is that insurance, operating behind the scenes to move pieces into place and leverage connections to rewrite a narrative heading south.

    PR firms are often hired for just this purpose alone — for on-call crisis management and nothing more — because it’s far better to have already an established relationship with an expert in your corner than to seek out a stranger once a crisis has arisen frantically.

    I remember a story that was about to break about a client of mine that would have reflected poorly on him because of a bit of misinformation. Because I already knew and trusted him quite well, I believed his account of things. I picked up my cell phone, called the CNN writer, and got the nonfactual information edited out from the story. If I didn’t have that in with CNN, my client’s career could have suffered greatly.

    3. Use the press to your advantage

    The press can be your enemy, but it can also be your friend. It’s its own form of gossip mill and works in quite the same way. You know how bad news can spread like wildfire when the media sinks its teeth into a juicy story? Well, the opposite is equally true: Good news can be canvassed far and wide if you have a worthwhile story to tell and get it out there in time.

    If there’s anything the PR community has learned in this day and age of big-name and big-brand crises plastered all over social media, it’s that narratives have power. On behalf of your clientele, you need to tell the narratives they want to be publicized. The press literally follows celebrities around everywhere. It’s just as easy to get them to snap a shot of your client speaking at a charity brunch as it is to get a shot of them sneaking out of a late-night club bleary-eyed. Book the photo op. Get the views. With enough views, a new story is written.

    Related: 5 Ways to Make Journalists Actually Want to Publish Your Brand’s Stories

    4. Know when to hold them and when to let them go

    All this said, there is a time and place to sit tight and wait things out. Strategizing is one thing, but smart management is another. When someone’s sizzling in the flames of bad press, that’s not the time to open their new restaurant or launch their new fragrance. Wait until the fire has died down but isn’t completely out — when your client is still a hot object of media attention but no longer the catch of the day — and then have them rise from the ashes.

    5. Listen, learn and do NOT repeat

    Helping someone out of a pickle once or twice is to be expected when you manage reputations. Anyone can get into a bit of trouble over almost anything these days. But if a client keeps making the same mistakes, you can either choose to cut them loose, or you can firmly guide them to stop pushing the repeat button!

    Attend to what’s being said about a public figure or brand; learn what you can from how these reports affect (or do not affect) your interest; and then, at almost all costs, avoid getting in hot water again. The easiest way out of a sticky situation is to not get into it in the first place.

    PR is an art, not a science, and like any art, you can get training in it to learn how to draw your own portrait, paint your own scene and write your own script. With media training and advice from publicity veterans, you can get ahead and get in front of the story — the story you want to tell.

    Emily Reynolds Bergh

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