Latest Strategy for Business Reputation Monitoring

Businesses and organizations of all sizes know the importance of monitoring their business reputation.

It’s easy enough to do from a consumer standpoint by checking common rating sites like Google, Yelp, or Glassdoor. Companies can see what people are saying and generally measure if customers are happy with a job well done or if employees value the company.

But are businesses also checking what is being discussed about their brand in local governments?

There are 89,000+ municipalities and all of them make laws that could affect your business. It’s a large audience who aren’t offering feedback in the same way consumers do. That’s a lot of opportunities to earn a bad business reputation.

A community might be forming an opinion about your organization before you know it. And the effects of a bad company reputation can have dramatic impacts on your ability to conduct business locally.

It’s important to manage your risk before it hurts future opportunities. Monitoring your business reputation among municipalities helps you stay one step ahead of any potential issues.

Why Monitor Reputation at the Local Government Level?

If you’re working with the municipality for things like permits and zoning, then it’s a safe bet that conversations about your company are taking place at local government meetings.

When a new business arrives in a community, they can be met with many different responses: fanfare, protests, or no reaction at all. In many cases, it is hard to detect a business’s reputation in a community before integrating into the area.

For example, local business owners might be concerned that a large regional brand might swoop in and steal their customers and employees. Or, the community may be concerned that the company’s operations will pose a safety risk for residents.

Whatever the concern or reaction, it is almost a guarantee that it is being discussed at the local government level. These discussions are public records, which means the intel is available to anyone including the businesses being discussed.

Organizations have an opportunity to leverage what is being said by monitoring local government meeting minutes and effectively use the information to protect or advance their interests.

It is a well of insight, yet it is often untapped.

Within those transcribed discussions, companies can get an idea of what a community thinks about their operations and services well before arriving in the market and start building support right away.

A complete business reputation management strategy gives you the opportunity to counter negative impressions of your business while promoting positive discussions, increasing the sentiment of your brand.

How to Get Ahead of Consumer Perception

Companies are at a significant advantage when they make monitoring a regular part of their business reputation management strategy.

There is compelling research proving it is worthwhile for businesses to proactively show how they’re ahead of government regulation at all levels and committed to issues like diversity and inclusion in the community.

These strategies not only help businesses maintain a positive business reputation but also helps them generate support from new customers and win customers from the competition.

Here are a few strategies for businesses to get ahead of consumer perceptions and maintain a positive business reputation:

• Lead change. In the consumer preference analysis Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer, nearly three-quarters (74%) of respondents believe CEOs should take the lead on change rather than waiting for the government to impose it.

• Link your brand with a strong purpose. When consumers think a brand has a strong purpose, they are 4.5 times more likely to champion the company and recommend it to friends and family according to Zeno’s 2020 Strength of Purpose study.

• Communicate your purpose. Create a marketing plan demonstrating your brand’s mission and core values. According to a 2018 Cone/Porter Novelli Purpose Study, 88% of consumers studied would buy a product from a purpose-driven company and 66% would switch from a product they typically buy to a new product from a purpose-driven company.
• Monitor local government discussions. As outlined, there are tens of thousands of municipalities and they are all having public discussions that may be of interest to your business. Monitoring these discussions for the specific information you need for your business to thrive could be a game-changing strategy.

The Easiest Way to Monitor Discussions about Your business’s Reputation

Your competitors likely aren’t thinking of using municipalities for reputation management, so you already have a leg up by adopting this strategy. But without an automated system, this strategy seems impossible to execute. It’s simply not feasible for businesses to keep up.

However, with the right automated solution, monitoring your business reputation is as simple as searching for mentions of your company’s name within the database of government meeting minutes.

Added Benefit: You can also use this technology to see what communities are saying about your competition by searching their names to see whether there are opportunities to position yourself against any negative perceptions they may have.

The guiding motivations for maintaining a strong business reputation are not new, yet new ways to gain this level of insight are waiting to be discovered and put to work.

Conclusion

Government discussions are an invaluable source for monitoring your business’s reputation. Curate makes it easy with our AI-powered software that tracks tens of thousands of state and local government discussions.

Ready to be in the know? Schedule a meeting with Curate to see how we can help your business monitor its reputation.