Reputation and branding consultant Andy Beal — who doesn’t have a professional relationship with Wells Fargo, but is a personal customer — agrees that the past scandals hit the bank hard, and crisis management experts can only do so much.

“Bringing in a crisis management team to repair Wells Fargo’s damaged reputation is akin to placing a bandage on a self-inflicted wound,” he said. “Rafferty did a great job of patching up Wells Fargo’s damaged brand, but her replacement should focus more on rebuilding the character of the bank to prevent future scandals.”

Wells Fargo should work on long-term solutions, according to Beal.
“Rebuilding a company’s reputation is a short-term solution that helps stem a crisis and grants a temporary stay on any lost trust in a brand,” he said. “Wells Fargo’s customers and stakeholders will watch closely to ensure the bank follows through on its commitment to rebuild its trust.”

Read the full story here: What’s Next for Wells Fargo as it Rebuilds its Reputation?

The post I explain to a Financial Times outlet how Wells Fargo can rebuild its reputation appeared first on Andy Beal .

…it’s not just the overeffusive we should be wary of, warns Andy Beal, a reputation and branding consultant. “Competitors or ex-employees might leave fake one-star reviews or purchase a package of negative reviews in an attempt to attack the reputation of a product or service,” he says.

So what advice does he have for review-reliant travellers? “Ignore both the one-star and the five-star reviews, especially if they were all published in a short period of time,” he said. “Instead read the two, three or four-star reviews, and pay attention to any comments that provide personalised criticism or praise. Generic reviews such as ‘Terrible service, don’t go there!’ or ‘Amazing trip, you should book it!’ should be ignored.”

Read the full article here.

The post The Sunday Times asks for my advice on weeding through fake travel reviews appeared first on Andy Beal .

When you think of “reputation management,” you will likely picture one of two different scenarios. Traditional reputation management is often equated to crisis communications. Whereas online reputation management usually brings to mind cleaning up Google’s search results.

Both are important, but reputation management—online or offline—is more than triage and clean-up. When you hire either a reputation management firm or employ a reputation manager (Chief, Director, or Manager, the title doesn’t matter), you are investing in much more than just reputation repair. You are investing in bringing harmony between the character of your company and the various departments that contribute to your brand’s reputation.

So, where and how can reputation management protect and grow your company’s brand? It is both the glue that keeps your reputation strong across all departments and the grease that eases friction and smooths out issues.

Marketing

• Does your website convey trust and leadership in your industry?
• Are your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts in compliance with Google?
• If a searcher Google’s your name, will they like what they see? Does it accurately reflect your character?
• Are your outbound efforts matching the expectations of your audience? Is your email frequency too high or too low? Are your retargeting ads too aggressive or too vague?
• Do your blog and social profiles post valuable, shareable information that strengthens your brand, or only press releases and sales pitches?

Sales

• Are you setting reasonable sales quotas or pushing them to close deals at all costs?
• Do you provide them with qualified, interested leads or ask them to spam inboxes and cold call?
• Are you listening to the feedback they provide? What are the most common reasons for losing a potential customer?
• Do you provide the materials that help them convey your company’s strength and trust?
• Are they involved before and after they close a deal?

Public Relations

• Do you blast out press releases and invade journalists’ inboxes incessantly? Or, are you connecting and engaging with them?
• Do you monitor what is being said about your brand on social media, news, and forums?
• Do you actively engage when you see stakeholder conversations about your brand, good or bad?
• Are you engaged in celebrating reviews and consumer-generated content?
• Do you nurture raving fans and brand ambassadors?
• Are you watching industry and competitor trends for opportunities or threats?

Customer Service

• Are they empowered to help a customer on all of your touchpoints?
• Do you collect feedback to pass on to other departments?
• Are you providing the information they need to answer difficult questions?
• Do you have a system for escalating to a resolution BEFORE the customer demands it?
• Have you set aside a budget for customer restitution?

Human Resources

• Are you transparent with employees about your company’s character and goals?
• Do you look beyond resumes and experience and focus on a passion for your company and industry?
• Embrace the diversity of opinion, cultural insights, and expertise of your employees. Your company’s character is not just a mirror of the CEO’s.
• Are your employees happy? Unhappy employees often mean unhappy clients, bad reviews, and a tarnished reputation.

Security & Quality Assurance

• Do you have plans for worst-case scenarios? Product defects, hacks, or outages?
• Are you actively listening to customer feedback? Not just hearing, but acting on feedback, concerns, and improvement suggestions?
• Are you investing in cybersecurity? Even a simple website hack could be devastating to your brand.

This summary is just the tip of the iceberg but, hopefully, you can see where a reputation manager can help your brand to reach the right audience, increase your customer base, keep them happy and engaged, and mitigate events that could undermine the investment you’ve made over the years to build a strong reputation.

If you’d like to learn more, have your reputation efforts audited, or simply connect, you know where to find me.

The post Why a reputation manager is vital for your company’s brand appeared first on Andy Beal .

The article has lots of great tips, but here is a selection of the ones I shared:

Honest reviews are often in the 2-4 star range

“Look for the middle of the pack,” said Andy Beal, CEO of Reputation Refinery, a reputation consulting firm. “I tend not to focus on the one- and five-star reviews. Competitors with ill intentions are going to leave one star. If it’s a friend or an affiliate, they are going to leave a five-star.”

When a business responds to a review, that’s a good sign they care

Just as important as the comments are the responses from the businesses. “It’s a really big plus for any property that actually responds,” Beal said. “Then you want to look at what the response is.”

A review will be more likely authentic if accompanied by a photo

A photo does a great deal to improve trustworthiness of a post. “Images are really important,” Beal said. “If a review includes images of the property or the food it greatly improves the credibility of the review.”

Read the full article for more.

The post Helping The Washington Post spot fake travel reviews appeared first on Andy Beal .

Andy Beal, head of Reputation Refinery, a consultancy on building businesses’ online reputations, has even included a chapter called “Don’t Talk Trash” in his book Repped. “Your reputation is only as strong as your character,” he says. “Eventually negative comments come back to you and your reputation will be tarnished. That can cause more harm than you think it will.”

And remember, anonymity is largely an illusion on the internet, says Beal, who has in the past been hired by a business owner to sleuth out the identity of a critical online commenter. That means that any dirty tricks you try, like pretending to be a competitor’s disgruntled customer and leaving negative feedback, have a strong chance of being found out, if not by your competitor, then by the review platform (e.g., Yelp) itself, he says. Apart from being found out, it’s a matter of priorities. Where can you most effectively focus your energies as an entrepreneur?

Read the full article: Why Trashing Your Competitors Usually Backfires—and What to Do Instead

The post Why trash talking your competitors usually trashes your own reputation appeared first on Andy Beal .

Have they demonstrated a contrite effort to change their character to better reflect the desired reputation?

Whether that’s a change in management, a change in production quality, or a change in the opinions that were expressed personally, without a sincere effort to improve their character any online reputation management campaign is a waste of time. More so, we don’t take on their project as we feel we would just be helping them to sweep the issue under the rug.

There are many reasons for this but, even if you set aside the fact that we would be attempting some kind of cover-up, the truth is, even if successful, they will likely face another reputation crisis down the road as the underlying character has not changed. And, as Abraham Lincoln once said:

“Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”

If you cannot, or will not, change the character of your personal identity or company, then you must accept that this now becomes your new reputation. Perhaps you feel strongly that your character is good and justified. That may be true, but a reputation attack means you were not transparent in building a reputation that matched it.

The post The most important factor when repairing a client’s damaged online reputation appeared first on Andy Beal .

Whatever the reason, that slow transition into COVID-19 branding strategy should also be applied to its exit back to normal advertising and PR campaigns.

Just as countries, states, and local communities are mapping out plans for a slow re-emergence to our “new” new-normal, so too should brands.

What does that look like?

Look at how your industry is handling it – just because some sectors are able to hit the ground running again, it doesn’t mean that your industry can. Check social media, ask your customers, and poll employees to see if you’re safe to re-start your social media campaign or ramp up your PPC spending.

Tap the branding brakes until things fully recover – many leaders are concerned that we may see a COVID-19 rebound, once we open back up. Just like them, you should not open the floodgates right away. Go slowly. The last thing you want is to be known as the brand that valued profits over people.

Invest in future-proofing your brand – no one saw the Coronavirus coming a year ago, but it may likely return next year. Even before you’re ready to kickstart your branding campaign again, start mapping out what potential crises you could face in the future. For example, the cruise industry needs to invest even more in making their ships safe and clean if they hope to calm the fears of potential passengers.

Explain any changes you have made – don’t just dive straight back into promoting your products or services. Start by highlighting key changes you have made to ensure customers can do business with you again. For example, if you’re a local restaurant, have you installed hand sanitization stations at the door and spaced out dining tables? Promote that, rather than your daily specials.

Understand your new audience – your target audience has likely changed. By that, I don’t mean you have a new audience, but that your existing audience may have new ideals or different spending habits. That branding campaign you had mapped out in January may no longer fit your target audience.

What were the positives you learned? – operating your business during the Coronavirus epidemic may well have brought new business practices or products that you had never before considered. Did you see an uptick in business because your retail store offered temporary curbside pickup? Keep it going. Promote it. See if something that was a big success during COVID-19 is something that should be an ongoing talking point in your branding efforts.

The above is the best I can do in terms of objective advice. As with all aspects of reputation repair and brand management, it’s impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all list of best practices. So, if nothing else, I hope this post gets you thinking about YOUR brand’s marketing strategy for safely exiting the Coronavirus pandemic.

The post Just like communities, brands need to stage their COVID-19 exit plans appeared first on Andy Beal .

I see many brands make the mistake of picking one social media platform and make that the hub for all their customer outreach and engagement. For example, a company focuses all of its creative energy on Facebook. It uploads videos. Posts photos. Published a special offer. Only on Facebook. They make Facebook their hub for their brand engagement.

But what if Facebook loses steam? What if their Facebook Page gets banned? What if Facebook says you have to start paying more for engagement?

I’ll tell you what happens, the wheel falls apart. You picked the wrong hub for your online reputation engagement.

Instead, you have to think of Facebook–or Twitter, or Google, or your newswire service, etc–as a spoke in your wheel. Each plays a role in supporting the wheel, but if one spoke fails, your wheel is still turning.

So, what is the hub?

The hub is the channel that you own. You control it. It is the central part of your branding. It’s your own website. My advice is to always use some kind of blog platform on your site and let that be the hub for all of the content you publish and promote. For example, that new sparkly infographic should first, and foremost, be published to your blog. Then you can share on Facebook. You can point your press release to it. You post a small section to Instagram. Etc, etc.

With this wheel strategy, your own site is the hub. The various channels are your spokes. And the tire is where your target audience lives. Your clients, customers, journalists, bloggers, investors, and partners are where your branding rubber meets the road!

The post This big strategy mistake could cause the wheels to fall off your online branding campaign appeared first on Andy Beal .

Airlines are empty. Cruise ships are diverting. Restaurants are thinning out. Events are being canceled. Employees of all types of companies are being asked to work from home.

There’s little a company can do to prevent the Coronavirus from affecting its bottom line, but there is one important thing that it can do, whether a business gets directly hit by COVID-19 or not: be transparent and truthful in its efforts.

The biggest reaction I see to the news that an event has been canceled or a business hunkering down for a week or two is one of disbelief over the action taken. “They’re overreacting!” “I am angry they didn’t warn us!” “It’s just the flu, grow a pair!”

As with any crisis, in the absence of transparency about a company’s actions, the media, investors, and customers fill the void with speculation. Rumors start. False info circulates. Assumptions are made.

If your company has to take action due to the Coronavirus, transparency–dare I say be Radically Transparent?–is key. Let your stakeholders know if local government pressured you to cancel your event despite your efforts to ensure safety. Assure customers that you are bringing in the very best cleaners to make sure your establishment is clean. Or, explain that you’re proud that many of your employees are retired veterans over the age of 60 and therefore it’s best they work from home. Whatever the reason, don’t hide behind the media’s mass hysteria about the Coronavirus. Instead, be truthful and frank about what’s going on, what action you are taking, and how you’re working to ensure the Coronavirus doesn’t affect your customers and employees.

In case you need an example, take Zest Cafe & Home Art. A local Raleigh store and restaurant that was informed that someone with the Coronavirus dined there. The SAME DAY it was notified, Zest closed its doors, scrubbed down, and, perhaps just as importantly, was transparent in announcing its actions to its customers.

Until we see the Coronavirus numbers drop, companies are urged to take an “abundance of caution.” I also urge you to take an abundance of transparency to reassure your stakeholders and protect your reputation from long-term damage.

The post The best way to protect your reputation from the Coronavirus COVID-19 is transparency appeared first on Andy Beal .

Online reputation expert Andy Beal, however, said the outbreak is not a threat to the beer brand, as it’s more likely consumers are confused about how the virus is named.

“The real threat would come if Corona were to dive in and capitalize on this by running some crass social media post,” he added. “The virus is serious, so they should not make light of it.”

Whether consumers are intrigued by the flurry of memes combining Corona with the Coronavirus, or confused by the origin of the name, Corona is doing the right thing by laying low and not trying to capitalize on the increase in search and social activity.

The post My warning for Corona Beer as searches increase for “Coronavirus beer” appeared first on Andy Beal .