Lis Anderson is founder and director at PR consultancy AMBITIOUS. An experienced agency MD with 25 years in the communications industry.
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Your corporate reputation isn’t incidental, and a positive reputation isn’t likely to spring up overnight. It’s something that takes time to build, nurture and protect.
Building and safeguarding your reputation isn't just a vanity project either. It has real tangible effects on your company's value, especially in today’s world where ethics and principles are key drivers in people's decision-making process.
On the consumer side, people are prepared to put more effort into sourcing a product, service or partner that aligns with their values—and they may even spend a little more to have that alignment.
While in the battle for talent, employees hold more power than ever before. Reputation plays a massive role in where people go, but more importantly, it determines whether—and for how long—they choose to stay.
Your reputation reaches far and wide, so it’s something you shouldn't leave to chance.
Recognizing Threats To Your Reputation
Risks and crises can come from any direction, and it doesn’t take much to unravel a lot of your hard work on reputation building. If there’s an external threat to your business, rest assured it’s better to know about it than be blindsided by it. Here we enter the joint worlds of stakeholder engagement and crisis management. It always surprises me how little foresight businesses put into these.
Ask yourself the following questions:
• How will you handle the fallout from a massive internal crisis?
• What’s your communications strategy for if your supply chain experiences issues?
• How are you engaging with external organizations that might be seeking to undo and undermine your projects?
If a problem blindsides you, you aren’t prepared to deal with it logically and rationally. So being aware of what’s out there is a massive advantage. On a macro level, having that entire ecosystem oversight is great at a glance. But you still need more.
You need to be able to see a potential threat and then drill down in detail to explore strategies, engagement and response tactics. What this looks like, in real terms, is a focused and ongoing commitment to stakeholder engagement and crisis strategies.
Then, there is the issue of how reputation can affect your recruitment and retention.
Your Reputation Drives Recruitment And Retention
Building and guarding your reputation has a huge effect on your ability to recruit and retain employees. Sites like Glassdoor are now extensions of your brand. But the challenge is that what goes on there is mostly out of your control. The unfiltered transparency and anonymity are what make sites like Glassdoor so potent. The reviews aren’t just aggregated opinions of strangers. They're from your teams and colleagues, and what they say can have a huge bearing on your ability to recruit new talent.
In cold hard stats, 86% of women and 67% of men in the U.S. said they won't work for a company with a bad reputation. Half of the candidates won't join a company with a bad reputation even if they'd earn a higher salary.
A whopping 92% of people would think about changing jobs if they were offered a job by a company with a great reputation. And 30% of job seekers have quit a job within the first three months of starting due to misalignment between them and the employer brand.
The numbers don't lie. In the battle for talent, reputation is the difference maker.
Using Storytelling To Strengthen Your Reputation
There’s so much more to storytelling than simply issuing a press release—why you tell a story is just as important as how.
What’s the purpose of any given story, social post, media release or piece of content? Is it to sell something? Raise awareness on a certain topic? Or maybe it’s just to offer something different, light-hearted and entertaining?
When it comes to creating and shaping narratives through content strategies, where I see most people fail is putting too much focus on the selling aspect. Of course, there’s a time and place for plugging a service, but if you’re always trying to close a sale, it will exhaust the audience and will likely be less effective overall. It’s exhausting for the customer who’s being bombarded by countless other businesses and brands with social ads, mailers and all manner of content littering their feeds on any given day.
So how can you be different? Well, by taking a human-first approach. By creating content that tells stories, creates links and builds bridges between you and your audience. Not only is this important for keeping your sales pipelines engaged but also your talent pipeline, as 68% of millennials, 54% of Gen Xers and 48% of baby boomers say they use social media to evaluate companies' reputations.
You are the sole owner of your channels; you have the power to dictate the flow of information. Make sure the information you share is honest, authentic and engaging. That social post you just published, that really helpful and informative blog post and even that hilarious right-on-the-money meme—these can catch someone’s attention and make them smile, think and laugh. That’s a powerful thing for your corporate reputation.
Building Trust
Building trust is the outcome you’re looking for. Obvious attempts to curry favor can often come across as trying too hard and a little desperate. People naturally push away from this because it seems disingenuous. Your trust-building must come from a place of true openness, honesty and authenticity.
Businesses that compromise on their ideals are quickly found out.
Key Takeaways
Safeguarding your corporate reputation isn’t something you should leave to chance. Loyalty is hard-won but easily lost, and trust isn’t something you can tangibly create. Trust is the end goal.
Be different by using your authenticity and values as your reputational currency. Be true to your core values, and communicate with honesty.
But all the stories in the world aren’t going to protect you if you have your head in the sand. Being wise to the threats you face, and putting strategies and plans in place to face those challenges honestly and authentically, will help you navigate when the water gets rough.
