May 16th, 2008

Companies take out insurance policies to protect themselves against fires, theft and acts of God. They make sure that their employees are well looked after and try to keep employee retention high.  When you consider all the effort undertaken to protect these important assets of the company, then the question must be asked… “Why don’t companies look after their reputation?”

If you think your building or your employees are important to your business, then you are correct. A financial or natural disaster can really affect a company negatively, but it is very possible to recover from these, however, a reputational disaster is almost impossible to recover from. There is plenty of evidence to support this and many companies have been ruined due to bad reputation management.  The purpose of this post is to help business owners to understand that money is not everything and that sometimes it is more important to make sure that the reputation of the company remains intact even if it means that you have to go above and beyond what is expected from the customer.

By making sure that your image and reputation are intact and that your company is actually investing in the improvement of its image you can make sure your company is on track to success. Yes, I did say investing… I said investing because it will require effort, time and sometimes money to build your reputation. A good reputation does not guarantee financial success but there is no reported incidence of a good reputation having a negative effect on a company.

You need to make sure that everything you do and say does not harm your reputation because a single bad move can ruin the image of your organization, built up over years and years. A fantastic innovation by an interent marketing company called Quirk is called BrandsEye which is sophisticated software which tracks your online reputation and how your brand is perceived on the internet. If you want to monitor your online reputation then I highly recommend checking out BrandsEye.

I hope that this information is useful to you and that you found it interesting. If you have any opinions or would like to comment, please feel free to do so.