Grayling Insights

Online Reputation: A New Breed of Opinion Leaders

Posted by Adrian Elliot

There are two popular anecdotes relating to online reputation management in Spain. The first relates to a well known furniture chain. A straightforward search on the Spanish version of Google, using the company's brand name as the keyword, will bring up a series of links relating to the store. The first two are from the corporate site. Number three, however, is a link to an entry from a well known technology blog, relating specifically to this company, and titled "How they lie to their clients". In spite of being aware of this situation for over a year, the company in question has not managed to remedy it.

The second relates to the launch of a new mobile phone operator a couple of years ago. The announcement itself led to a number of logistical hiccups since it was operated solely online to add value and the company was unable to cope with the enormous demand in the first few days following the launch. Hundreds of clients therefore ended up waiting months before receiving their new phone and sim card. Customer service could not deal with the level of complaints, and so after a few days, YouTube rapidly filled up with videos created by angry consumers, in which they could be viewed waiting indefinitely for a customer service representative to answer their call. Service eventually improved but the damage to the company's reputation among many of their potentially most loyal clients continues to have repercussions to this day.

A new breed of opinion leaders

Both these examples illustrate the democratising power of the internet. However, it also clearly presents risks. Safeguarding a company or brand's reputation is no longer just a case of communicating a series of messages to a reduced group of opinion leaders in the media. When something goes wrong, in minutes the information can appear on a blog, in a comment on a social network, or on an online forum, and, once the damage has been done, it is difficult to remedy it (although there are tools and techniques that we can advise).

However, with sufficient anticipation, together with raised awareness of the importance of the online medium, there are a number of strategies that can be adopted in order to ensure that while there will always inevitably be the risk of disenchanted customers airing their view online, the company's messages do also get across to the right audiences, thus mitigating the long term effects on the company's reputation.

Get involved in the conversation

The most important task is for businesses themselves to participate in the online conversation. First of all: Don’t panic. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there and attempting to influence all of them is impractical and will never offer a sufficient return on investment. In reality, most of these bloggers base their information on each other's opinions and so it is much easier to identify the smaller number of 'online advocates' who are capable of influencing the rest of the online universe, or at least ensuring that the information gets to them first.

Have a response prepared (and be prepared for a quick response)
Secondly, companies should be alert to the kind of stories that may have repercussions online and ensure that their official line is already out there. Remember that while many are amateurs, the more influential bloggers are to an extent “professionals” and their success also depends on their ability to maintain their own reputation. They want to have the truth at their disposal when they write but may have less time than traditional journalists to perform research. We must therefore discover the tools they use to get informed: Social Networks, RSS feeds, news aggregators, etc. and find ways of ensuring that they are never more than a couple of clicks away from our client's viewpoint.

Build loyalty and trust

Finally, the limitations facing bloggers in terms of time and resources are an opportunity to us all. If we provide specific bloggers who have already demonstrated their interest in issues relevant to our client with regular first hand industry information, it should not be too difficult to build loyalty and for them to one day come to us asking for information. This is especially useful in the case of medium sized, specialist blogs which are still in need of hooks and stories in order to generate a strong following.

In terms of directly contacting bloggers, a lot of it is based on trust. Bloggers do not generally like to be approached by companies who are trying to sell them something they don't want or who try to 'use' them in order to get free plugs for their service and products. This is where your PR consultancy comes in. In the same way that we have worked for so long in building our relationships and contacts in offline media, good PR consultants are now establishing themselves as the correct path to influencing 'online advocates'. We have been qualifying for this role by being there ourselves, blogging, participating in social networks, and above all, providing something positive to the overall online debate.

Ghost blogging

The growth in the online medium has led to a considerable number of spin offs all of which are in some way related to our field of PR. One new role that has arisen in this new context is that of the ghost blogger. An increasing number of freelancers with journalistic experience and considerable awareness of the language used in the blogosphere write and publish blogs in the name of their clients, be they celebrities or corporate heads. A number of bloggers have gone even further, offering global online communication services. One well known 'on-line' advocate in Spain is reported to charge companies a fee in exchange for references in the entries he publishes under his alias on the Microblogging tool, Twitter.

Experiment with strategies

We have a wealth of experience in all areas of communications and now our task as PR consultants is to adapt it to the new tools that are available in order to create a more coherent strategy with more clearly defined objectives and the right tools to measure success. As was the case with the dotcom boom, online communication is in a very experimental stage. Innovation is key but only time will tell which strategies are most successful.

We are out there on the front line to ensure that we gain increasing online credibility. We can work with clients to help them calculate the benefits of these new channels to enable them to manage their online reputation.