Bad reviews travel fast: Tripadvisor and online reputation management

By Eileen Lin, Consultant, ReputationInc


Here is the situation: You have just over an hour before the evening performance, and stumble upon what looks like a decent pre-theatre menu.  After all, anywhere with fast service and reasonable food will suffice.

The punter at the door promised you snacks within 5 minutes and drinks within 10 minutes. You enter full of hope, only to find that after 20 minutes, you have not been served at all, despite having asked the waitress twice. Then, when your food is finally ready  45 minutes later, it never reaches you, because it sat on a service stall for 10 minutes in the middle of the room, where all the guests and staff had to walk past.  At the end of the meal, you find a 12.5% ‘voluntary’ service charge added to your bill. What do you do?

Do you…
1) Refuse to pay for service
2) Ask to speak to the manager
3) Pay the full bill and vow to never come back again, or
4) Pay the full bill, nod, smile, thank the staff for their hospitality, only to scurry home to write a long and whining online review criticising the poor service?

Let’s face it.  Britons are no good at complaints or confrontations. Most of us faced with this situation would probably prefer to avoid the embarrassment of making a scene and quietly ‘vote with our feet’ instead. However, with social media, things have changed. Popular review websites such as Tripadvisor.com have enabled consumers to get their own back on restaurants and hotels that disappoint.

The extent of such influence was well-documented by a recent documentary by Channel 4, entitled ‘ The Attack of the Tripadvisors’, where a group of B&B owners, whose life and business fortune had been made hell by the review website, confronted their critics. For the hosts, the hardest things to come to terms with was the fact that customers always seemed happy when leaving the premises but as soon as they reach their nearest computer, the meal has turned sour and the stay uncomfortable.

Why didn’t you tell us so, they cry, rather than simply slating us online? We would have done something about it, they say. To illustrate the emotional damage the site has caused, one B&B owner went as far as to say that she had ‘considered paying for a hacker to destroy the website’ because it had turned her childhood dream into a nightmare.

I cannot honestly say I don’t have sympathy for these struggling independent businesses. However, they are missing a fundamental point: the reviews websites are merely a reflection of the increasingly high standard modern consumers have come to expect from anyone that seeks to take their hard earned money from them. We all laughed when watching Fawty Towers, but who among us would actually be happy to pay to stay there?

Over the years, consumers have become increasingly conscious of their collective power and rights, while social media has enabled individuals to have influence beyond their immediate network.  This rise in citizen journalist has forced businesses to re-examine how they obtain and manage customer feedback.

Rather than blaming the reviews website for mis-management and accusing the critics of being cowards hiding behind computer screens; businesses, large and small, must learn fast. Not only on how to deal with customer complaints online, but also how to turn each crisis into an opportunity, using feedback to inform business strategy and action changes. After all, we know that customer satisfaction and advocacy tends to increase when a complaint is cordially addressed, compared with when there is no complaint at all. Managing customer feedback, and thus business reputation, is no longer a communication tool, but a business imperative.

The new normal for Corporate Communications functions

By Mark Hutcheon, Associate Partner at ReputationInc

The past decade has witnessed transformational change in areas ranging from geopolitics to teenage leisure pursuits. But one of the most dramatic shifts has been in communication as digital technology, social networking and 24 hour news have become dominant forces in the transfer of information from business to business, from business to consumer and from consumer to consumer. The new dynamic has forced every business function to adapt, perhaps none more so than corporate communications.

Once, corporate communications was relatively simple. Its main role was to liaise with the press: sending out releases when necessary, arranging half-yearly meetings between members of the media and the chief executive and making sure a coterie of senior journalists were on your side.

For some corporate affairs directors, the role was even more prescriptive: asked to act as guardians of information, they saw their job as ensuring the press knew as little as possible about the businesses for which they worked.

Today, such control is almost impossible. Thanks to the internet, virtually anyone can find out virtually anything about virtually everything. That alone imposes fundamental change on the corporate communications department. But the situation has been intensified by the economic downturn and its impact on the reputation not just of banks but almost every aspect of the corporate world.

Consumers are demoralised, disillusioned and disappointed by a wide variety of sectors and industries – which means companies have to work harder than ever to gain their customers’ trust. And who takes responsibility for this task? Invariably, it falls to the corporate communications team.

So the corporate communications function is broader and deeper than it has ever been. The nuts and bolts of traditional media management - writing press releases, developing relationships with key journalists and ensuring they have access to senior executives when interim and full-year figures are released – remains. But, as every corporate affairs director knows, the role has become far more sophisticated.

Today’s corporate communicators have to cope with 24 hour news flow so journalists expect to be able to talk to people in the know from morning to night, seven days a week. But news flow is not just about journalists responding to a corporate announcement. Today, news can emerge from bloggers, social network sites, activist websites and the like. As events ranging from the Arab spring to the UK August riots make clear, spreading information is breathtakingly easy these days – and corporate communications teams need to be able to monitor what the electronic world is saying about their company and – equally importantly – influence those messages.

At the same time, companies are under pressure to cut costs, so corporate affairs directors are being asked to justify their budget and do more with less. Chief executives expect their corporate communications team to bring the outside world in, explaining the way the company is perceived and shaping those perceptions. They expect the press office to deliver genuine thought leadership, offer meaningful advice about how to enhance their company’s reputation and act as an antenna to risk. These are high value functions that will test the competencies of the best communicators.

To many corporate communications directors, this plethora of demands can seem excessively challenging. But what if they view the ‘new normal’ as an opportunity to take the corporate communications function to the next level?

Smart operators are already changing their teams to reflect the new reality – ensuring staff have the requisite skills to cope with the demands being placed upon them. Sometimes, this involves recruiting new talent. But existing team members can become superb advocates for their organisation, if they receive appropriate training and gain an understanding of what they need to do and how best to do it.

Despite the recession, raising the skills and competency bar through capability building is vital. Shrunken, newly assembled or over-worked teams will enjoy both a performance and morale boost from an investment in their in the competencies.

As we see it, the classic development approach is still relevant. Discover the competencies (and therefore gaps) most needed to advance the business and reputation goals; design a learning methodology and deliver it across multiple points and channels. It should reflect the learning philosophy of the company, mix foundational level training with master-classes customised to different levels and exploit the latest experiential learning tools.

Wherever your function is on its journey , competencies in reputation management, corporate campaigning, reputation foresight and reputation content are becoming indispensible.

There is no going back to the old ways. Corporate affairs directors have to adapt. Those who face up to the challenge, relish it and ensure their staff are equipped with the requisite skills can prove their own worth and elevate the status of their entire team.

The alternative is a slow erosion of the corporate affairs function. And, for savvy, sophisticated communicators, that is simply unacceptable.

Building Reputation from the Inside Out: The Power of Employees

By Nuno da Camara

As I listened to Stephen Dorrell’s comments on the failure of the Care Quality Commission to uphold health standards this week, I was reminded once again of the fact that every organisational reputation issue is fundamentally about behaviours inside the organisation.

The Care Quality Commission, said the former Health Secretary, allowed a culture of ‘tick-box’ bureaucracy to develop rather than physically carrying out site visits on a regular basis. The root of the problem is cultural and, therefore, relates to the behaviour of leaders, managers and employees inside the organisation. Similarly, the Deepwater Horizon crisis this year was caused by BP’s inability to establish a proper safety culture on its offshore drilling sites. Culture was also at the root of Toyota’s recall of several of its US models in 2010 due to the ‘sudden unintended acceleration’ problem. As the company Chairman Akio Toyoda explained to the US Congress, the company got its priorities wrong and developed a culture of volume, rather than one of quality and safety. Examples of how culture is at the root of reputation abound. Admittedly, this may seem like a fairly obvious point but the fact still remains that when a reputation crisis hits the headlines much of the focus is on repairing relationships with external stakeholders. Even more worryingly, reputation is rarely considered from an internal organisational point of view. Yet, given the instrumental role of internal culture it is critical to explore how reputation works with employees and how it can be built from the inside out.

Firstly, we should look at why reputation is not always automatically associated with employees. The issue is largely semantic. By definition, reputation is what other people think of your organisation. In this context, we tend to think of employees as part of the ‘organisation’ and not part of the ‘other people’. The reality, of course, is that employees are actually stakeholders of the organisation (i.e. the management team who employs them) and are therefore ‘other people’ too.

Moreover, employees do form reputational judgments about the organisation that they work for and this impacts on their behaviour and commitment at work. Today, there are numerous surveys and rankings of employer reputation which attest to this fact (e.g. http://www.greatplacetowork.com/). Employer reputation or the reputation of an organisation as a "good place to work" is strongly associated with employee engagement; and, employee engagement has been reliably linked to organisational performance . The time has therefore come to properly acknowledge employees as a reputational stakeholder in their own right.

Furthermore, employees are unique in the stakeholder map of any organisation because they come into daily contact with the other stakeholders. As Andrew Moss, the CEO of Aviva, one of the world's largest insurers, noted in a round table discussion on corporate reputation: ‘our reputation is shaped on a daily basis by the many thousands of people who are serving our customers in our call centres’. Beyond the realm of customers, reputation is also being formed by constant employee interactions with suppliers, investors, regulators, NGOs, media and other stakeholders. So, if an organisation has a good reputation with its staff this will have a powerful multiplier effect on its reputation with all stakeholders. Happy staff are keen brand advocates and are worth their weight in gold.

In addition, a highly dynamic feature of employees is that, as well as being the main actors in organisations, they are also an audience and consume the same media as other stakeholders. As such, employees read and hear about their organisation all the time and are highly aware of its reputation externally. Naturally, employees are motivated to work for organisations with a good external image. In many cases, this is exactly what attracts employees to organisations in the first place and, once they join an organisation, it is what makes them proud to be a part of it. This is often referred to as Perceived External Reputation and research shows that it has a positive impact on employee identification, commitment and performance .

There are therefore two types of reputation with employees:

• Reputation as a “Good Place to Work” - Employee belief in organisational leadership, goals and strategy and perception of how the organisation manages reward and recognition, career development and work/life balance, which impacts on employee engagement and commitment.

• Perceived External Reputation – Employee perception of how the external stakeholders view the organisation, which impacts on employee pride and advocacy.

These two types of reputation are strongly related to each other. Employees of an organisation with a high "good place to work" reputation are more engaged and committed and perform better at work. This has a positive impact on external reputation, which is perceived by employees and adds to their motivation even further. Hence, a positive feedback loop is set off in which a good reputation is sustained for the long term. Conversely, if internal reputation as a “good place to work” is poor, this will demotivate employees and eventually feed into a poor external reputation, which will only serve to demotivate employees further.

Since culture is at the heart of reputation organisations must focus on the development of internal reputation and its impact on employee behaviour. Without doing so, and without being aware of the gaps in internal and external reputation, organisations will not be able to sustain a good reputation over a long period of time. But the prize for those organisations that do understand the critical links between internal and external stakeholders is a reputation that looks after itself and keeps on getting better for years to come.

Follow the Leader: Apple’s corporate reputation after Steve Jobs

By Mark Hutcheon & Jeremie Guillerme

As the world digests the news that the Apple King has left the orchard, the big issue of leadership transition is raised. Can the company’s enviable reputation be maintained with the top man, icon and founder no longer around?

When they leave an organisation, iconic leaders may not only leave big shoes to fill for their successor, but also a corporate reputation gap to catch-up with. This is why leadership transitions often require taking a look at how a company’s reputation is shaped. In this particular case, this means asking whether too much of Apple’s reputation equity was built on its previous leader Steve Jobs.

First signs of nervousness came from the stock market, with investors greeting new chief executive Tim Cook by selling shares and marking the company's value down by more than 5%. The share price of Apple recovered to near parity within 24 hours of the news, and one would expect that consumer and employee sentiment will follow the same curve. Nonetheless, Cook has the duty of protecting the precious commodity of confidence and trust in the reputation of the company.

To convince so many people that the best days for the company lie ahead is a phenomenal challenge to any leader or communicator. With his reputation of being an operations expert rather than a visionary leader, Tim Cook will need to deliver clear messages to investors, employees, and Apple enthusiasts across the world that the company will continue to bring new technology breakthroughs to market, and surprise consumers.

For the next two or three years, Cook will benefit from Apple’s legendary new product pipeline. His ability to nurture the culture of innovation and creativity will be put to a more difficult test only at the end of this transition period. This should leave him with enough time to define his CEOship as much as his personal style, while being inevitably constrained by the aura of the former leader, who will stay around in spirit and physically as Chairman.

The future of Apple will bring interesting insights on how a leadership change can affect a company’s corporate reputation. As the global economy has led multinational companies’ ownership and management structures to get more and more complex, a charismatic leader remains a strong reputation asset. However, even the world top-ranked company in terms of reputation will need to demonstrate its ability to maintain and develop its reputation when the magic of its iconic CEO has disappeared.