Today(26.11.2009) we went to Pohjoisranta, a management consultancy that specialises in reputation management. Riikka Rantakari (manager) held a lecture and it was so intertesting! At the beginning we just started talking about what we thought of reputation and which companies would have a good/bad reputation. We came up with quite a few examples of companies that have good reputation in one country but a bad one in another.(Nokia:Germany-
What was very new and surprising to me are the results of a research, which calculated the value of companies if they had the reputation of their competitor.
For example if Coca Cola had the reputation of Pepsi, their stock would go up by 3% and boost the market with $4 billion.How crazy is that? The value of perception is unbelievable!
Generally one can say that reputation management consists of X stages.
Stage 1:
The company knows what reputition they have and take it very serious. However, Riikka told us that most companies don’t really take their reputition serious. A lot of them don’t even know how important it is.
Stage 2:
Compared to the previous stage,this one is a lot more systematic and stakeholder driven
Stage 3:
Here the reputation is reflected in every strategy and plan. The personnell (etc.) knows what the reputation of the company is. Additionally a lot of training is done in the field of reputation management so their ability to manage it is very high.
Reputition management has 3 basic principles:
1. Reputation ALWAYS begins WITHIN the organization. The personnel should always be put first!
2.Reputation is built around contacts/encounters and its management means taking good care of those encounters with all interest groups which is a lot of effort and costs a lot of time.
3.Reputation is created with stories and its management is the management of those stories. The stories are things you’ve heard from other people about a certain company and you forward them to yor own friends/family. The stories are very powerful especially when they go to big media. These days, it is very easy to spread news and stories especially through means like Facebook and Twitter. Those means can hardly be controlled.
Another interesting aspect is the measurement of reputation.
There are reputation profile comparisons between the competitors of peers. This might look like a little radar:
Following online discussions and monitoring the reputation online like in Forums,blogs and discussion boards for example. There are really people who read all of that and do graphs so the companis can see where they stand in the market according to their stakeholders.
Actually there is a lot of work behind the campaigns and projects that are supposed to manage your reputation. The user usually only sees the product and does not know how many hours were spent on the material production and intensive planning so that the project runs well and a good reputation is built.
Finally,I think it is very crucial to add that reputation is not perceived the same in each country. It is not seen and understood as important everywhere. If you go international you should be aware of that and adapt your actions according to the “guidelines” of the target country.
