Friday, July 31, 2009

Reputation: The World’s Window on Your Status





What is Reputation?

What is Reputation? “Reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. It is an important factor in many fields, such as education, business, online communities or social status. Reputation can be considered as a component of the identity as defined by others.”





Why build up your reputation?







As an individual we want to have a good reputation because these merits exclude us from extensive inspection from others as well as bad publicity. Since the dawn of civilization people are trying to build up their reputation for a lot of reasons.
First, it builds up your credibility, it helps you build trust and credibility with other people; it can help a merchant or businessman persuade someone to buy from you if they are not sure and it is also far easier to raise your prices if people perceive you as an expert. Second, reputation can take you anywhere; politicians with good reputations almost always win a sit in their intended positions and win the heart of its voters. Companies with good reputation also have an advantage over its competitors because they can get the trust of their customers for as long as they can assure the quality of their product.
Third, reputation can alter everything. It is true that reputation is the window of the world to your status so you must take care of it. “It takes twenty years to build a good reputation and only five minutes to easily ruin it. A good example of this in the telecommunications industry, Big companies like Globe, Smart and Sun took years of good reputation management to keep them in their game but it only takes one bad rumour to spill a stain in their good reputation.
Reputation is a factor worthy of being monitored and taken care of because it a major factor that will take a person, group of people, a company or an organization a step closer to their goals.




How to monitor your reputation?
Before the birth of the internet reputation is only small and difficult to trace, since there is no means of sharing on line before reputation revolves around the word of mouth and years of dedication of building one though publicity. But with the birth of the internet information transfer from one are to another in a snap became possible and so does the scope of on line reputation.
From that day reputation of a person or a company takes on a bigger area because it is not only concentrated on one place, their reputation can go all over the world because of the vulnerability of their data in the internet.
Yes, their good reputation can go all over the world in just a few clicks of the button but also their bad reputations or some fancy rumours about people and their company. So people and companies must device a way in monitoring their own reputations and take actions immediately to stop the bad publicity ruining the company’s impression.








But there is good news, monitoring tools are available and attainable to help an individual or a company keep an eye on their publicity issues. These tools can help people and companies detect the problems and look for a possible solution before the problems develop into bigger liabilities. Not only can monitoring tools give you a clairvoyant eye on your publicity problems but it can also detect how your customers, competitors and stakeholders feels about your company.





According to the book of Radically Transparent by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss, there are three essential monitoring tools that you can use in keeping a close eye on your reputation.
1. Really Simple Syndication (RSS):
Stated from www. Wikipedia .com: RSS (most commonly translated as "Really Simple Syndication" but sometimes "Rich Site Summary") is a family of
web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed" or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based.




2. Tracking software: tracking software is used to track the most hidden web content and will notify the user as soon as the changes occur. This incurs a cost to the user but is it worth it especially for big companies that are having a hard time monitoring their valuable reputation.

3. Email Updates: this is the simplest form of updating you with the changes in online activity and it is easy to use. Just subscribe to Google Alerts and type in the phrases you want to update on the program will instantly alert you via email to the latest updates related to the words you had type into. This is compatible to small scale business or individual people because it is free but at the cost of causing a flood on their inboxes.

A leading problem in the telecommunication industry in the Philippines is the issue with the unwanted extra charges being placed in customers load. This issue not only appeared in the newspapers but also in news on line and in blogs of other people. Through on line monitoring telecommunication companies such as Smart can take action quickly by removing the problems associated with the issue.

Lastly, you must have someone to monitor your company, Monitoring tools are useless without someone to monitor and sort out data so it is advisable to hire someone who can do these things for the company. It is also less advisable to out source because in house employees are more dedicated than out source employees and knows the company better.

For us students I think we can benefit from these monitoring tools like
Google alert, ACS's Serph and Boardtracker.com if we start the research on our chosen company and our main competitors. I hope Mr. Ramon Duremdes can give us more knowledge in using the other tools stated above so we can perform at our best.
For references and other opinion about my blog please consult the blogs of Danielle Benig, Camille Caleon, Julie Nolasco and Ikah Hemedez.

1 comment:

  1. good points why reputation is important and the tips regarding how to keep an eye on it... apir!!! hehe XD

    ReplyDelete