How People Centric Strategies Can Augment Your Online Reputation Management
Having a good online reputation management system in place will improve the prominence of a company. It can help with overall search rankings, increasing the visibility of a company’s products and services when compared against other competitors. In this article, we want to touch on the human aspect of an online presence of a company. People will always place more trust in a brand that is identifiable and approachable.
The Team behind the Company
If you build your website with absolutely no hints as to who is behind it, the brand might be associated with sketchy businesses — it doesn’t necessarily reflect confidence in your own brand. Would you do business with a company that doesn’t feel secure enough to put the names of the people behind it?
That is why the section About Us or The Team should be available and easy to find for any new website visitor. Having names, photos and a short description is ideal as prospects can immediately associate the brand with people’s faces. This increases your trustworthiness as a business and will offer a more secure feeling to customers.
Further, setting up a page for your whole team is also a great start to optimize the online presence of your prominent executives or spokespersons. Search engines, like Google, also takes into account whether a website is transparent with their employees or contributors.
Employees as Ambassadors
Previously, in the business world all public relations functions for a company were top-down. However, in recent years, this has shifted towards a model where your employees and often the most prominent ones are your primary ambassadors and first in line for your brand reputation.
Businesses are people-centric and empowering employees to speak on your behalf requires you to place a lot of faith in them to make good decisions. However there could still be rules for external communication and that is usually a good idea. As such, provide training and guidelines on the things that they may say or not when in conjunction with your brand.
Additionally, it is a good idea to encourage employees to grow their online presence, which will complement the company’s online presence on social media.
For example, your employees can update their LinkedIn profiles to associate them with your business. This will enable those pages to rank higher in search results. Likewise, inviting your employees to connect with the company’s profile on Twitter and Facebook pages will help those as well.
The human aspect and team transparency are highly relevant for any company and has huge potential upside for the long term success of any business.
