The business of reputation management

 In 1940, two brothers decided to open a restaurant that sold hot chips, hamburgers and drinks. Richard and Maurice McDonald’s idea wasn’t original; many people had done this before.

But why is it that 70 years on, their idea is now the world’s largest fast food chain, feeding 46 million people a day?

The answer is branding and reputation management.

Voltaire once said:

 “Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. 

The most original writers borrowed one from another.”

And neither is the idea of reputation management an original one. Ever since people have been providing products and services, there have always been those around to help manage their brand.

Reputation management lies at the heart of the success of businesses both big and small, including McDonalds.

Particularly in times of crisis, businesses are forced to go into full scale damage control mode in order to protect their reputation.

Take the Ribena crisis for example. As The Guardian reported:

“Two New Zealand schoolgirls humbled one of the world's biggest food and drugs companies after their school science experiment found that their ready-to-drink Ribena contained almost no trace of vitamin C.”

McDonald’s is also no stranger to this kind of scrutiny. The fast food chain has found itself in hot water many a times for advertising of their products as nutritionally good for you.

In circumstances such as these, the importance of reputation management is highlighted.

But being in the midst of the digital age has brought new challenges to the idea of reputation management.

70% of people have faith in consumer opinions posted online, a 2009 Nielsen study found.

This means that 70% of people will believe what is written about your business online. Whether the content is true or not, defamatory or not, or created by you or someone else, it will most likely be believed.

In light of this, managing reputation online has never been more important to the success of a business.

With so many blogs already devoted to online reputation management, how will we make our blog, Traceable, and our web feature different from all the other features out there on reputation management?

Firstly, there are not a lot of features aimed at students aged 16-25 years old. So we will aim our feature at this target user group as a means of helping them to learn about the potential pitfalls of using the internet and social media in particular.

In the digital age that we are in, learning how to shape, manage and mould one’s reputation is imperative to job prospects.

So showing this age group not only how to manage their own reputation, but how their potential employers manage the reputation of a business would be a different spin which we would put on the feature.