The summer season has already begun, and with it, the holidays. It is a different summer, one in which undoubtedly less traveler traffic and fewer hotel bookings are expected, making the control of digital reputation in the tourism sector especially important, as well as minimizing communication crises or the appearance of trolls that work against businesses.

Where can a reputation crisis occur?

• In search engines: It is especially important to review and control complaints and comments on Google My Business. A large part of users locate these reviews in the very early stages of their search.
• On specialized portals, such as Booking, Trivago, etc. Opinions on these pages are especially relevant, as they are part of users’ final decision-making process.
• Social media.
• On blogs.
• Forums.

How to prevent it?

• Listen: Conduct proper brand monitoring. This includes monitoring comments on all enabled portals, as well as monitoring forums, blogs, and review pages.
• Manage our digital identity through the comments or content we share. It is important to have a digital and marketing strategy.
• Measure: Interpret statistics, generate periodic reports, and detect potential communication problems.

These actions are framed within a digital context. However, customers are undoubtedly served in the offline, in-person environment, and the service they enjoy is a complete experience. Taking care of the customer experience, attention at the establishment, and resolving doubts or problems is fundamental to prevent an offline incident from becoming an online crisis.

Tools for measuring reputation.

There are numerous platforms and tools on the market. Some are free, and a large portion are paid. The free tools to start initial monitoring and reputation control are:

• Google Alerts: allows you to include keywords as alerts. The system sends a notification every time the search engine’s crawler locates content that includes those keywords.
• Blog search engines, such as Google Blog Search, IceRocket, Sphere, Blogdigger, or Backtype.
• Forum and conversation search engines: Omgili, Boardreader, Boardtracker, Blogpulse with Conversation Tracker (highly recommended), or Trendpedia.
• Don’t forget to add the RSS feeds you are interested in to a reader from which you can easily follow them, such as Google Reader.

The key: be prepared.

Being prepared in advance to reduce the surprise factor is vital for reacting in time. These are the points to consider:

• Establish criteria that define what would be considered a social media crisis for the brand or company, and specifically for each department.
• Establish an action plan in case of an online reputation crisis.
• Create an organizational chart that reflects how information and actions will circulate.
• Define responsibilities.
• Define coordination and cooperation between departments.

If you believe you may be on the verge of a reputation crisis, or if your business’s image in the digital environment causes your clients not to consider you as an option, please contact us.

At onBRANDING, we are experts in Digital Identity and Protection, Online Reputation, Privacy, and Cybersecurity.