Transforming Your Enterprise with Reputation Data

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, rather, it’s the one that is most adaptable to change.”

- Charles Darwin

In today’s increasingly complex and ever-changing data-driven market, reputation management teams instinctively understand the importance of protecting and maintaining their company’s reputation. However, one of the central challenges in building and maintaining a strong reputation stems from the information we’re consuming, as it is all too often clouded by disinformation. Regardless of the cause, effective reputation management solutions, backed by predictive, data-driven insights, are more important than ever for companies given today’s complicated environment.

Common Reputation Team Needs

A key industry 2024 report cites 42% of communication leaders are “very much so” relying on data, and half cite “inability to measure impact effectively” as one of their biggest challenges. So in light of today’s volatile reputational landscape, what’s a communicator to do? The problem is, these data sets are often highly disparate, making them difficult to aggregate. It’s also challenging to tap into predictive, deep analytics – backed by science, machine learning and AI – to drive actionable business decisions. Nevertheless, integrating these analyses and reports directly into team workflow, and securing enterprise-wide adoption of advanced tools, must be prioritized to dial in a successful reputation intelligence system.

We recently explored ways to overcome these challenges during a Page Patrons webinar titled “Transforming Your Enterprise with Reputation Data”. Medtronic’s Corporate Data and Insights team was tasked with connecting the dots between reputation drivers and business choices, and to effectively convey the contextual and data-driven impact of reputation on their decision-making processes. MAHA’s integrated reputation platform provided the tools needed to take Medtronic’s measurement strategy to a higher level. Critical questions that we needed to be asked:

• Can we better predict future risk?
• Can we integrate siloed data into consolidated reputation performance metrics?
• Can we get multiple departments to adopt a new framework?
• By correlating reputation and business performance outcomes, can we reach impact goals faster?

Reputation Measurement Strategies

Key steps to consider when using advanced reputation intelligence analytics:

• Move beyond metrics extracted exclusively from traditional survey or polling data (as polls and surveys are expensive and take time to aggregate and analyze). 
• Obtain tailored analytics that reveal the critical attributes impacting success within your industry – to help you gain clarity on your performance.
• Develop metrics that increase predictability while unifying company behavior and public perception such as regression modeling and decision trees. 
• Identify gaps between behavior and perception to help you better understand how actions impact stakeholder perception, where there are pre-existing reputational risks and communications opportunities, and how these factors influence financial performance.

Reputation teams embedded within communications departments need insights that build on what people think, feel and say, and include real-time competitive intelligence on how corporate action can build resilient reputations. Done correctly, these actions drive change in sentiment across all of the organization’s key stakeholders. 

A Roadmap for Driving Business Outcomes

Medtronic’s ‘insights-led’ transformational journey involved a comprehensive analysis of their own performance compared with industry competitors. Next, we demonstrated the links between key reputation drivers and business outcomes (including financial outcomes). MAHA’s reputation intelligence platform is set up to provide team-specific insights to managers across many different groups within corporate communications and marketing. The ability to serve teams in a variety of business functions helped eliminate silos, both in terms of the data-sets being analyzed and the insights being generated. As adoption continued, a clear picture of risk and opportunity emerged throughout the organization, allowing Medtronic to positively impact both reputation and brand value.

Integrating high-quality reputation data into the decision-making processes is essential for any organization interested in building reputation resilience. Equally important, however, is to use a science-backed analytical approach to generate forward-looking insights. This will help optimize work around reputation and will build trust with stakeholders and is the best path towards achieving measurable improvements in business performance.

Note: The content above was published through the Page Patrons program. A Page Patron is a leading solution provider that, in exchange for sponsorship of Page, works with us to educate members about how tools and services like theirs help enable world-class communications capabilities. If you have any questions or suggestions for future Page Patrons, please contact Kelly Greene.