Communication Guidelines

Communication guidelines help you prioritize daily reputation management tasks and decide which issues to respond to first.

Depending on the size of your following, you may receive a lot of mentions and reviews at once, so you’ll need to decide what’s urgent and what can wait.

• Urgent: Could this review hurt your brand? Check the profile of the person who wrote the review. If they are popular in your space, the negative review may have a better chance of going viral. In this case, the situation may be urgent.
• Not urgent: Could this situation be easily resolved? Is this a typical question or concern that you can easily address? It probably doesn’t warrant an urgent response. But be sure to set an acceptable time frame for addressing non-urgent communications. You don’t want to leave your customers hanging.

What you consider urgent will depend on your goals and your audience.

For example, if your audience primarily frequents TikTok, you should respond to negative comments there before negative comments on Facebook.

Tone of voice

Establish a tone of voice and share guidelines with anyone in your company who communicates with customers or creates content.

Here are some things to keep in mind when building your brand’s tone of voice:

• Who is your target audience phone number lead and how do they communicate with each other?
• Is your brand formal or informal, or somewhere in between?
• Does your brand communicate with slang and emojis?
• Are there words or phrases your brand should never use?
• What is your brand’s mission and how does it affect communication?

You can use our tone of voice template to define how you want your brand to sound.

A good way to start is to choose adjectives that describe your brand (e.g., “cheerful,” “trustworthy,” “authoritative,” etc.). Like this:

Remember that changes in tone may be necessary in online reputation marketing.

For example, Ben & Jerry’s often has a light-hearted, playful tone of voice.

But the brand takes a more serious tone when it talks about its social values.

3. Monitor brand mentions

You need to know what people are saying strengthen loyalty behaviors and turn about your brand, and fast. The longer you wait to respond, the more the negativity will spread and the more the problems will escalate.

You can set up Google Alerts for your brand name and any misspellings to receive an email when new results appear in Google Search.

However, this does not detect everything. And the results may take some time to appear.

That is why we recommend using the Brand Monitoring application to monitor your online reputation.

This tool automatically collects mentions from dozens of platforms, including news sites, blogs and discussion groups.

This saves you time and gives you a more accurate picture of how people talk, share and interact with your brand across the web.

After signing up, create a ” Brand ” query. Then enter your brand name and other settings.

When you are satisfied with the settings and preview, click ” Create Query “.

You will get a detailed report containing your most recent mentions.

Use filters to focus on specific types (for example, those with negative sentiment).

In the ” Analytics ” tab, you can track mentions and sentiment over time.

And it collects a lot of other useful data.

Use the information in the tool to assess the status of your online reputation and take action if necessary.

4. Plan your crisis management strategy1

Crises happen without warning. The good news? You can prepare for them with a crisis management strategy.

Your strategy should outline an internal communications plan, which team members will handle public responses, and how to address social media mentions.

Here are some things you can do to prepare in advance:

1. Use media monitoring tools . Tools like Brand Monitoring will quickly alert you if unexpected conversations about your brand occur.
2. Follow industry trends 3. Legislative or cultural changes or technological advances can put your business to the test, depending on your industry.
3. Find out which channels your audience prefers and how to communicate most effectively 4. If your audience gravitates towards sault data Facebook, use Facebook as your primary communication channel. This way, you’ll reach a wider audience more effectively.
4. Who is responsible for responding to comments and reviews 5. You can choose to have one or two people communicate publicly during a moment of crisis, depending on the severity of the situation.
5. Draft responses to react quickly to negative comments 5. Just make sure no one copies and pastes the same response without personalizing it. This can seem insensitive in a time of crisis.

While it’s best to avoid a crisis, sometimes things are beyond your control. How you respond can make or break what your audience thinks of your brand overall.