What is Media Reputation Management?

A look at how media reputation impacts your business, the challenges associated with managing media reputation in the age of social media and what you can do to manage your media reputation.

This is the first post in a series of posts about media reputation management: what it is, and how Hypefactors is using AI to improve the ability of businesses and brands to react and adapt to what is being said about them in social and news media. In this short blog post, we will be discussing media reputation management, and its importance for the public relations of your brand.

Defining Media Reputation Management

Media reputation management is simply the process of monitoring and influencing the reputation of a brand or organization as expressed in traditional and social media. Generally these activities fall into one of three categories:

Building: Often taken on by start-up companies or new organizations, who need to establish themselves with customers.

Maintenance: Ongoing work for most established companies in which their reputation among their customers is good, and they want to maintain this reputation.

Recovery: Taken on by organizations that have had their reputation damaged by bad reviews or media coverage.

Is Media Reputation Management Important?

Reputation management is an integral part of running a successful business. There is no shortage of examples of companies that have suffered significant losses in both revenue and market value as a direct consequence of changes in public opinion about their brand in the negative direction. At the same time, the ability to cultivate a positive public opinion about your brand is a strong competitive advantage. Something similar can be said for the public opinion of political and governmental organizations. Having bad publicity in digital or social media can of course discourage potential new customers, and in worst case maybe even cause you to lose existing customers. Moreover, search engine rankings are increasingly taking into account the online reputation of your brand. Your SEO efforts therefore also depends on how media and people perceive your brand. 

Monitoring what people and media are saying about your organization is the first step in avoiding the proverbial shitstorm and taking advantage of opportunities for improving your reputation. In the age of social media and digital news however, monitoring what is being said about your brand on a global scale is becoming increasingly difficult. This is true both because of the sheer number of media mentions an organization must read and react to, but also because of the multilingual and multicultural nature of the global media landscape. In particular, the communication landscape has shifted to what you might call “bottom-up”, where a vast amount of brand mentions occur on social media or in reviews.

For example, the estimated number of news articles published every day is estimated to 100.00, with a reading time of 1.2 billion seconds or 2.200 years daily. Add to that the 500 million daily tweets and 420 million Facebook status updates and you have a significant challenge if you want to monitor what is being said about your brand on these platforms. These statistics should convince you that effective media monitoring and media reputation management requires both automatic monitoring, but also automatic analysis in order to distinguish mentions that require your attention from mentions that do not.

Reputation Management Software

In order to address criticism publicly in a constructive way, you obviously need to realise when people are talking about your brand. In the reality of social media however, this is easier said than done.

As a consequence, many organizations are adopting software tools to assist them with tackling PR and reputation management at scale. Hypefactors provides a state-of-the-art PR automation software that replaces time-consuming manual work with intelligent automation. It’s a comprehensive one-stop platform, driven by powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) that automates Public Relations and Earned Media tasks.

Conclusion

In this blog post we have discussed what media reputation management is and why it matters to your organization. We have discussed the different activities of media reputation management, how it impacts your business, the challenges posed by a modern media landscape and what you can do to overcome these challenges. In coming posts we will talk about how you can utilize AI to support your media reputation management efforts and how Hypefactors is pushing the state-of-the-art in this field.