Threats to Your Reputation

What makes up a company's reputation?  Paine describes it as the relationships that a company has with its public(s). It's what people think of when they here about the brand, it determines if people will buy or recommend the products or services offered, if they'd want work or invest in/for the company.

The trust, commitment and satisfaction that companies try to build takes awhile to build up, but can be lost in seconds. Grunig, Grunig, and Dozier came up with four principles to help in a crisis situation.

1) The Relationship Principle says that the company can go through it issues and crises easier if it has established good, long-term relationships with its target audiences who are at risk from the company's behaviors.

2) The Accountability Principle says a company needs to accept responsibility at the time of the problem even if was not their fault.

3) The Disclosure Principle says that during a crisis the company must give all the information it has and promise to give the information it doesn't have soon after they receive it.

4) The Symmetrical Communication Principle says that at the time of a crisis the company needs to think about the publics interest to be just as important as its own, meaning that the company should have a conversation with publics and to practice CRS when in crisis.

A company that failed at keeping up their reputation was Dell in a crisis called Dell Hell. A blogger wrote about a problem he had been having and a large group of other customers commented with similar stories. The consequences were that the story spread through social media then moved to mainstream media and their stock price dropped. Dell went through many years of listening to customers, apologizing and working to fix their computers to restore its reputation. It took a number of hefty discounts for people to come back to the company.