“Let Your Company’s Online Corporate Reputation Glow….”

04 / 09 / 2019

• op-ed

What is more fulfilling than enjoying a favorable reputation for your company?  No doubt that the image and reputation of a company are among the factors that attract the customers to the company and to trust it and to become loyal customers.  We care about our corporate reputation because it takes a long time to build and takes minutes to destroy, plus it’s based on the company’s past actions, performance, attributes, and possibilities of our future behavior in the minds of our stakeholders both inside and outside our companies.  Corporate reputation also has to be earned and is not granted, borrowed or inherited.  All the efforts done by the firm to create a favorable personality are wrapped up in the corporate communication that the firm conducts for reputation management, both offline and online.

It is worth noting here that the positive corporate reputation leads to trustworthiness and credibility that the different stakeholders have with the firm because after all they are the ones who create its reputation.  Thus, managing the corporate reputation is all about managing the targeted publics’ perceptions.

In this article I intend to present an insight about some of the strategies of managing companies’ favorable reputation online.  It all starts with the company’s awareness about the outstanding capabilities of the Internet in this aspect of interactivity, global range, massive data, availability, immediacy, etc., as an effective marketing communication tool for online reputation management (ORM) and having a staff member to take over this big task.  The Internet can also backfire, as any angry customer with a company may hurt its image by broadcasting a negative opinion about its products or services on review websites or on the social media.

Company online visibility is the first strategy for preserving your favorable reputation.  It is the total presence of the company and its products or services in the total customer environment using the different business platforms.  The appreciation of the social media capabilities in securing company online visibility can be capitalized in incorporating company reputation into business processes.  That is, the dynamic use of social media as a marketing communication channels may help you to link reputation to the overall strategic marketing objectives of your company.  Examples of the use of social media for creating and protecting corporate reputation will include: creating interesting blog; which will help you follow customers’ submissions and comments and also react to complaints of the customers as soon as it happens, and offers you the chance to follow the social echo. Furthermore, setting up an effective Facebook page, a LinkedIn page, YouTube, a Twitter account are all boosts to visibility online, but make sure that your customers know that those pages exist.

Managing company websites content is paramount for polishing the overall image of the company.  It has to be done with vision and with creativity in order to capture the attention of the targeted publics. It is functional to include scheduled posts on regular bases about your company’s achievements, news, innovations, new management staff members, new clients, new product lines, new projects, awards, etc. It is also advisable to furnish your website with videos, which are engaging to the viewers especially when they are well-organized.  You may organize them according to projects, by types of products, by clients, by stages of manufacture or by company department.  Company product videos are important to show the pride of the company; particularly the ones that include a ‘know how’ in design or manufacture.

To make your websites more interesting, you may also adjoin interesting company photos and info-graphics, which include charts and diagrams because they are dynamic contents because they can be repurposed by other websites.  The pictures should all stand behind and serve a vision and a favorable reputation that you want to resonate in the customers’ minds every time your brand name is mentioned or your company’s logo is viewed by them.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an overriding means to glow your company’s name and business.  It means to increase the quantity of traffic to your company websites by giving you priority to be seen in search engines.  When people search for any item on search engines; such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing, they see a ranking of websites appearing in a list.  The order of this list doesn’t show randomly, but it shows according to a logic; the first shown sites will be the ones with certain criteria and would answer best the search of those people.  Thus, the search engines put the displayed list in an order according to which websites fit those criteria.  It is pre-eminent that you make some modulation to your websites in order to fit those criteria and to show in the beginning in clients’ searches for your kind of products or business and to increase the chance of showing first in search results.  When you make those alterations, we call your company websites to be ‘optimized’.

I would like to mention here some of the means for optimizing your websites, and the first of which is: ‘domain authority’, the idea is that a link from a website with high authority is more important than a link from a site with low authority, which means, it will decide how you rank on search engines.It is also useful to increase the inbound links to your websites.  An inbound link simply is a link from an external website to your website and an outbound link is a link from your site to an external website.

Besides, it is recommended that you choose the right keywords that are relevant to your business which you may very well find among search engine keywords.Moreover, search engines are sensitive to the relevance of a page and a non-relevant one.  Thus, the words you include in your websites should be closely related to your activities and types of business.  Also, the website speed is desirable.  The faster your page will load, the more optimized it will be. Finally, the mobile friendly design of webpages is highly ranked by the search engines because the overall trend today is to support the idea of an actionable and flexible websites, simply because they are easier to use.

We will resume to witness developments in the potentiality of the Internet to brace business and our companies to widen our growth potential and those who wish to continue to prosper will be keen to defend their favorable reputation and the Internet’s missions in this respect will become more and more complicated as life itself is becoming  around us …….