Reputation + Internet = It’s not about what you say about you, but about what they say about you
Brands were able to manage and develop their reputation according to their needs with impressive TV Spots, press advertising, and offline events. The maor question regarding how to generate a useful reputation was how much it costs to get the more visibility and opportunity to make your voice heard. Internet has not changed the monetary part, but has a bit changed the means to succeed and opened unusal opportunities to succeed without using mainstream means of communication.
When speaking of online reputation (part of the global reputation, and more and more an important business driver) we understand also word of mouth and personal influence spread. The essential point is then you need to know what people are thinking about you to figure out what’s the trouble with the relationship between brand and consumers before seting up communication campaigns. To do so, you need to monitor it (I’ve already spoken about it in other posts, have a look at tag Monitoring to know more). One other way is to use crowdsourcing brand perceptions as Karl says at ExprienceCurve, speaking of the best example of this way of working that is Brand Tags, a social application using community personal perception to re-create a tag cloud of terms related to the brand that provides a sort of brand reputation snapshot, and created by Noah Brier, one of the famous strategists of NakedComms. Using this Brand Tags system for every market would help communications planning targeting reputation issue and enhancing positive brand image. A really smart idea.
