How to Manage Your Company’s Corporate Reputation in the Digital Age

Reputation is key today for any brand or business.  You spend all that time building up the brand, building a culture (internal and external) and it can be gone overnight.

Like Health and Safety, Diversity and Inclusion, Sexual Harassment, etc, Leaders can no longer hide from the fact that employees use social media.  A business now needs to recognise this and rather hide from it and pretend it does not exist, they have to embrace it and proactively support it.

If we look at Simon Kemp's Q4 Digital Snapshot 

https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2019-q4-global-digital-statshot

There are 3.75 Billion people in the world active on social media.  Your staff are on it, your alumni are on it and your future employees are on it, your prospects are on it and your customers are on it.

So here's a thing.

Why don't we start using social?  Why don't empower people to use it and use it for our own advantage?

How do I mean?

We can use social to support maternity returners, make them feel welcome and get them contributing quicker.  In fact we can use social to enhance the employee experience across the business, supporting new starters enabling them to contribute faster.  We can also use it to get salespeople to contribute faster.  This, often is a game changer and the business case for this change in business.

Empowering your staff on social will also enable you to get access to the talent faster.  It will probably even reduce the amount you spend on recruiters and job adverts.  It might even make you the employer of choice in your industry.  This again is often a business case, based on the savings.

But emphasising the employee experience, social is often a driver to help retain employees and impacting on the recruitment process. 

We can use it to get more customers.  In terms of “value” we reckon that each salesperson can get an additional meeting per-week, assuming a 1 in 4 close rate, 10 months a year (let’s keep the maths simple and nothing really happens in August and December) so that’s an additional 10 deals a year.  If you find out what the average deal size is, multiply that by 10 and the number of sales people and you have a “Value”.

For example; 10 salespeople, with an average deal size of $50,000 would be able to generate $5 million.

Finally we would expect a 25% increase in employee efficiency in using social.  That's 25% more employees for free!  Again, another business case.

As a business leader you could increase efficiency, reduce costs, reduce the cost of recruitment, increase retention, increase revenue and increase the general well being of employees.

Nice work!