Reputation Management is an ever increasingly important aspect of business. Especially when it comes to the arena of the Internet, it becomes even more important. Much can be said about dissatisfied customers and the libel of the competition, but what of dissatisfied employees?
This aspect of reputation management demands its own treatment. With the power of the Internet, many disgruntled employees have found a devastating outlet for their frustrations. While many aspects of managing your reputation in this sense are case by case, there are a few ways to deal with reputation management in this special case that are more universal.
The first question is whether it's an individual doing this, or a group of employees. While a single employee can do damage to your reputation, reputation management gets more problematic when a group of employees gets involved. Without getting too nit-picky, some individual concerns should be dealt with.
Many people simply are unsatisfied with having to work to begin with and are just griping on their blog journals. Sometimes they may have legitimate complaints. A good rule of thumb for reputation management with these cases is to have an internal complaint and recommendation system in your corporation. This saves you from having to track and essentially spy on your employees, as it nips the problem in the bud.
The internal complaint and suggestion system can also go a long way in reputation management with disgruntled groups of employees. Again, the key factor here is to keep the complaints within the company, rather than having it spill out onto the Internet. Of course, the system will only be as effective as your follow through on the complaints.
Having this system in place and functional will go a long way towards the implementation of other reputation management systems in your company. For example, policies against public complaints become viewed as tyranny if there isn't a satisfactory outlet for complaints.
This can lead to people disregarding the threats of disciplinary point systems and firings for non-compliance. Giving employees a voice internally goes a long way toward keeping them from claiming one on the outside. Better reputation management means not having a reason to defend yourself.
Of course, if it becomes necessary to use defense in reputation management, it then becomes a question of what to do with the people who disregarded the rules. First, you should check and see that the internal complaint process is actually working. It may be that the public criticism went through the right channels without results.
In such a case, it's probably bad reputation management to fire the employee or employees outright for making their complaints public. It should then be addressed publicly, right where they posted it. From there, the conversation should be taken "off list" and resolved.
Sometimes, however, the proper procedure does get ignored. In the interest of reputation management, it then would well behoove you to address the slight on the same forum, while mentioning the breach of policy. Then you discipline them as per your policy. This way, you come out the good guy.
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