What is Enterprise Reputation Management?

Every review shapes the narrative of your brand. And in today’s market, where a bad review can mean the difference between a won and a lost sale, online reputation isn't just a buzzword—it's the heartbeat of your enterprise.

While reputation management matters for all businesses, big and small, managing your enterprise / corporate reputation comes with unique challenges - usually related to a realistic scale across multiple locations.

In this post, we’ll delve into the intricacies of enterprise reputation management and provide strategies for positioning your brand as the right choice in a competitive market:

• What is Enterprise Reputation Management?
• Enterprise vs Small/Midsize Businesses: At Scale
• Benefits of Enterprise Reputation Management
• How to Implement an ERM Strategy

What is Enterprise Reputation Management?

Enterprise-level companies are large, established organizations with complex operations, distributed teams and a significant online presence/brand reputation to manage.

The definition of enterprise reputation management (ERM) is the practice of monitoring and improving your reputation across all online channels at a corporate level. It involves a range of activities, including:

• Reputation monitoring: tracking and analyzing online mentions of your brand to identify potential reputation risks or opportunities for growth.
• Negative feedback and crisis management: addressing reputation crises or negative PR that can quickly escalate and spread across the internet.
• Reputation repair: restoring a damaged reputation through content marketing, digital strategy and streamlined customer support.
• Online reputation protection: implementing measures to prevent or minimize future brand damage.

Enterprise vs Small/Midsize Businesses (SMB): At Scale

All businesses need to invest in their reputations to be successful. For enterprises with a high public profile and diverse range of reputation goals, reputation management looks a little different. 

The main difference between ERM and SMB reputation management is centralization or the standardization of reputation management efforts across all locations and departments. But, there are a few other factors to consider when determining your strategy: 

1. Scalability

A precise and targeted reputation management strategy (one that focuses on specific review channels or social media) often works for SMBs. Enterprise businesses, however, need to take a more proactive and large-scale approach. 

Brand consistency is key to successfully managing your enterprise and building a positive online reputation.

Investing in a scalable reputation management strategy for your enterprise will make it easier to align individual locations, onsite teams, sales channels and customer touchpoints with your brand standards. 

2. Uniformity

Establishing uniform processes and protocols for reputation management ensures consistent branding and messaging across all locations. 

Internally, any technology or tactics used to track reputation metrics–such as reviews, social media performance, competitive stats or emerging trends–should be the same across the board.

Enterprises deal with higher review numbers and volumes of data. They also require multiple users and admins. Ensuring uniformity across locations (via standardized review response tactics, escalation procedures, brand guidelines, etc.) mitigates any miscommunication and makes it easier to glean insights from your review data. 

Externally, ERM is unique in that a damaged reputation for one location can affect the entire company's bottom line, leading to lost customers, decreased sales and weakened credibility across the board. 

While it can be difficult for an enterprise to bounce back from a reputation crisis, it’s not impossible. A unified approach to your reputation management strategy will make it easier to rebuild lost trust in the event of bad press. 

3. Reporting

While many SMBs manage their online reputations through location-specific reporting, enterprise businesses must operate differently. 

With diverse sources of feedback from various locations and platforms, it’s often easier for enterprises to measure performance via single-point reporting. 

Single-point reporting offers the most efficient method to gauge your enterprise’s reputation performance. It provides a more comprehensive overview of your brand's online reputation at scale, allowing you to highlight individual locations and compare them across your entire organization.

Further, single-point reporting makes it easy to identify trends/track performance metrics like review volume, brand sentiment, and areas for improvement across your brand. 

Benefits of Enterprise Reputation Management:

• Automation: Integrate your database to send review requests to your customers more efficiently. The right reputation management partner will make it easy for you to get more reviews through automated requests.
• Strengthen stakeholder confidence: A protected and thriving reputation will boost stakeholder trust in your business.
• Drive growth: A positive online reputation will attract new customers, increase sales and build trust with stakeholders. A strong ERM program will identify areas for improvement and new performance opportunities with benchmarking and data analysis.
• Protect your brand: ERM helps identify and mitigate reputation risks before they become larger issues. You protect your brand from negative publicity and online attacks while positing your business as the right choice for prospects.

How to Implement an ERM Strategy:

• Set goals and objectives: Define your goals and establish holistic metrics to measure your progress.
• Conduct a reputation audit: Assess your current reputation and target areas for improvement through factors like online sentiment analysis and stakeholder feedback.
• Make a plan: Clearly outline your goals, strategies and tactics for monitoring and managing your reputation.
• Respond to all negative comments: Build a process to address negative feedback promptly.
• Establish a crisis management plan: Develop a crisis procedure that will efficiently mitigate the impact of any negative events on your company’s reputation. Ensure responses to negative feedback are professional, clear, and communicated effectively across all teams.
• Foster a positive reputation: Create positive content about your brand, amplify your customer’s positive experiences and invest in top-notch customer service.
• Optimize SEO content: Publish high-quality online content, whether through blogs, newsletters or visuals, to improve your brand’s online visibility and position your company as an industry leader.
• Continuously monitor for improvement: Use monitoring tools and metrics to track online growth and identify weak points.
• Advocate for your employees: Foster a positive company culture and high employee satisfaction. Your employees represent your brand, so it’s important to empower them to participate in your organization’s reputation management initiative and provide the best customer service possible.

Reputation management is essential for all businesses. For enterprise corporations especially, investing in a comprehensive, strategic approach is key to maintaining brand consistency and building trust with your customers.

Empowering your teams to proactively monitor, manage and improve your online reputation can protect your brand and drive growth in a competitive market.

To learn more about what a reputation management strategy can do for your brand, check out Widewail’s Enterprise Reputation Management Service and Solutions.