Reputation Management for New Media Survey - How ready are you?
Written by Paul Dunay on July 1, 2008 – 1:02 pm -
One of my goals this year was to do a study on reputation management. As we all factor in the effects of new media on our brands, I felt this was a topic with long-lasting appeal to every marketer.
My hypothesis going into the creation of these questions was that B2B marketers (including yours truly) just aren’t adequately prepared for an online reputation crisis. Dell wasn’t, Wal-Mart wasn’t. If those big B2C brands weren’t ready, I was betting we weren’t ready either. And I was right!
To be totally transparent with you, I wasn’t surprised by many of the responses to my survey. The bulk of you are monitoring your reputation in some way, shape or form. But are you poised to respond in the case of an online reputation crisis? 55% admitted you weren’t.
Perhaps you need stronger guidelines in place, like a blogging policy. Two-thirds of respondents don’t have one!
Many of you are do-it-yourselfers when it comes to monitoring your reputation. Is that perhaps because your company hasn’t made this a strategic priority? 53% admitted it wasn’t a strategic priority for you – yet!
My goal here is to give you the state of the union when it comes to monitoring reputations online. This data is bound to change, so I hope I get you thinking of ways to close the gap with your organization’s reputation!
Click here to download the free research report
Special thanks to my sponsors – Trackur.com, run by the renowned Andy Beal of the blog MarketingPilgrim.com, and Marketing Profs’ equally renowned Ann Handley for their support on this survey.
Tags: Online Reputation, Reputation Management, Reputation Monitoring
Posted in marketing 2.0 |
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July 1st, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Thanks, really useful report
July 1st, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I am somewhat surprised that this is a “new” issue. Wasn’t this also an issue pre-social media, when disgruntled employees and customers threw together a website attacking your company? I know it was much harder to put up a website, but just about every Internet provider offered some server space for a website to its customers. And indeed some major companies were victims of attack websites.
Along comes social media which makes it extremely easy to put up a blog and trash your boss. I suppose it’s the ease of use that makes this a sudden “hot issue.” But it’s not a new one, nor is reputation management a new topic. Companies of all types and sizes have ignored this issue for years, if not decades.
If you’re company happens to be involved in higher education, you’re prevented from putting too many constraints on your faculty who will scream bloody academic freedom at the first sign of censorship. It’s amazing what people with tenure will say and do.
Companies have no blogging policy because they had no reputation management policy to begin with. Any movement towards a policy will have to be built from the ground up and include media relations including, yes, letters to the editor. Any newspaper worth reading posts their daily letters to the editor on their sister website.
The answer is a comprehensive reputation management policy that includes social media, not a blogging policy that ignores reputation management.
July 1st, 2008 at 3:30 pm
[…] Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing for BearingPoint has recently released a report about reputation management in today’s world of Web 2.0 and social media.. […]
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:03 am
This is a great initiative.. I would also probably seek information on as to how people are monitoring online reputation in different countries. How are people responding to the (probably) daily reports that are being sent on their respective brands.
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:11 pm
What is the deal with the charts with a 1 through 5 on the x axis and an untitled column with percentage in it and decrementing rows.
Not to be too harsh but this is basically unreadable and therefore not worth paying much attention to except for the fact that companies are understaffed, unprepared and lack solid strategies for dealing with future reputation problems on the Internet.
I’ve written in-house policy for many companies. All are different in the final wording, but each shares several core rules of response and engagement. I absolutely love asking the series of questions that results in an often heated discussion about what’s best for the company when it comes to responding to external negative forces.
I applaud the effort to better understand the general business landscape’s mindset regarding online reputation as well as your desire to learn from it. Hopefully this will drive the discussion forward on the forum and elsewhere.
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Thanks for the comments guys - it makes it all the more satisfying to me to be able to provide data like this for you
Moksh - there isnt enough data to slice it by different countries but I have to image we are all doing reasonably the same kind of thing
Tom - great perspective on the issue past and present - I totally agree a comprehensive reputation strategy is in order
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:24 am
very interesting but the linke to the report does not work, can you fix it?
July 5th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Thanks for the great survey, Paul. And it underlines the idea that if much of your commerce/interaction is happening online then you should have a community manager. We’re the best at monitoring & responding.
July 10th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
[…] in Brand Monitoring Over on the Marketing 2.0 blog I’m writing with some awesome people! Paul Dunay shared a survey that he did on reputation management. The community manager is the voice of the […]
July 13th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
I’m curious how many people participated in your survey?
Can you provide a few details about sample sizes, demographics, etc.?
July 13th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
[…] Paul Dunay did a survey with a question about blogging policies and found that 63% of companies surveyed did not have a formal policy in place regarding employee blogs. As an aside, please notice that only 86 people responded to this question and his research does not include any demographic or research methodology data, so I would be cautious about using this data to make any significant decisions. With that said, it got me thinking about whether blogging policies were important or not. He also suggested in his analysis that it might be better to think of social media policies, rather than limiting it to blogging policies. […]
July 19th, 2008 at 3:00 am
[…] Reputation Management for New Media Survey - How ready are you? […]