|
Reputation management based on integrated clipping data and reputation surveys
Most corporations are already aware of the importance of reputation, but still reputation in mostly not managed strategically and systematically. The reason lies in the comprehension of the term “reputation”, which is very all embracing and abstract. By the definition reputation is a sort of social recollection about an organisation that forms on a basis of our past experiences with the organisation. It’s an evaluation of the organisation’s appeal.
It is often not clear who is in charge of managing reputation in an organisation. Communication experts? Sales? Human resources? The management? The second problem in implementing systematic and strategic reputation management in corporations lies in the way reputation is to be effectively controlled and how to proactively react to crisis situations that may compromise corporate reputation. But since expert surveys demonstrate that media have the greatest influence on reputation (that is where we get the most information about an organisation we are not employed in or we are not in cooperation with), public relations and/or communication departments often manage the organisation’s reputation. They perform the function mostly through media relations and corporate advertising and for evaluation of their activities they carry out clipping analyses. On the other hand most of them have access to data of the reputation researches, performed on a yearly or two-year basis. Despite all these data the so-called reputation managers do not see the connections between the media publicity and oscillation of the reputation. As a consequence journalists and media mould their organisation’s reputation instead of themselves.
For this reason SPEM designed a special model called IRIS© – Intelligent Reputation Information System that provides the reputation managers with all the necessary data support for effective integration of corporate reputation.
The four-stage reputation management model consists of:
The model encompasses the clipping data and the data of the reputation researches, performed twice a year. It has proven itself effective, as we have provided statistical evidence for the changes of certain reputation elements through time. A part of the changes are explicable with the media publicity of the period. Using the model we can very easily evaluate the oscillation of reputation, based on certain topics in media. This tool allows us to effectively control the organisations reputation in the media and to foresee the extent of positive and negative topics about the organisation in the media. By managing news we can control and manage the organisation’s image in the media. A fact is that individuals perceive the topics as important when media devote a lot of attention to the topic in question. But this also means that in the time of a crisis we can successfully redirect the media’s attention with launching equally or more important topics. In a one-year period we managed several large crises that we otherwise didn’t have an affect on, keeping reputation on the same level. We even significantly improved certain elements of reputation.
|
|
