AI Reputation Management: How To Automate The Process of Protecting Your Brand

A company’s brand is the heart and soul of the business. It’s the foundation for customer relationships and defines who you are in the marketplace. Despite taking years to build, a brand is quite fragile. All it takes is one wrong message to destroy years of work and cause irrevocable damage to how others perceive you. Your company’s brand should be protected at all costs, starting with careful reputation management.

Importance of Reputation Management in the Digital Era

The digital world has made it incredibly easy for people to share their thoughts and experiences with others. Because digital platforms offer greater anonymity, customers tend to feel more comfortable being brutally honest. 77% of customers look at two or more review platforms before deciding which company they want to do business with. If you’re not monitoring what’s being said about your company online, your brand’s reputation could take a huge hit without you ever knowing what damage is being done. That’s where AI reputation management comes in.

Definition of AI Reputation Management

AI reputation management refers to the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to existing brand reputation management strategies. Due to its advanced analytical and predictive capabilities, AI has the potential to actively monitor online reputation management efforts and suggest ideas for how to influence customer perceptions. It can also work independently and take steps to proactively manage your reputation online, such as automatically responding to customer reviews.

Understanding Reputation Management

Reputation management is a broad term including any strategy or action that has been taken with the intent of building or defending your company’s reputation. To really grasp how much of an impact AI reputation management tools can have, you first need to understand how AI is changing traditional reputation management.

Traditional Methods vs. AI-Driven Strategies

Traditional reputation management strategies are largely reactive. They rely on a human monitoring online messages or reviews and noticing issues so a communication strategy can be created in response. At the basic level, this could look like receiving a negative review from a customer and responding to the review.

On a larger scale, it could look like noticing a common theme in social media comments about long wait times when contacting customer support. In response, the company would work to improve customer support processes and reduce wait times, then organize a PR campaign to promote these improvements and boost the general sentiment surrounding contacting support.

With the emergence of AI reputation management software, companies can be more proactive in their online reputation management efforts. Unlike humans, AI has no limit to how much data it can review at once, so companies will glean more insights in shorter amounts of time. Those insights enable them to take steps to proactively grow and build their reputation instead of always being on the defensive.

AI Tools and Technologies for Reputation Management

Overview of AI-Powered Tools Available

So, how does AI actually help you manage your online reputation? Well, it depends on which AI tool you choose. Many businesses like to partner with a reputation management company or platforms like Podium that have reputation management tools that can help them more effectively control their online reputation. Others prefer to purchase a specific AI tool to assist in one area of their reputation management efforts. It all depends on what you need and what your budget allows.

To help you understand what’s possible with AI, here are a few examples of what an AI reputation management tool can do:

• Automate review invites and reminders to encourage all customers to leave reviews, improving the positive-to-negative-review ratio
• Perform sentiment analysis and flag highly negative reviews for human team members to review
• Use conversational AI to independently draft and send responses that sound as if they came from a human
• Schedule and post social media content at optimal times for peak user engagement
• Identify trends or patterns in messages across channels
• Generate reports with key insights about where your current reputation stands and areas for improvement
• Suggest specific actions to improve your online reputation
• Compare historical data and real-time trends to predict future problems
• Improve SEO efforts with keyword finding, backlink checking, SEO analysis, etc.

Case Studies of Successful AI Reputation Management

Politicians, influencers, non-profits, educational institutions, and businesses are all adopting AI reputation management software for more widespread monitoring of their digital profiles. AI reputation management tools are being successfully used in various industries, including HVAC, Furniture, Home Services, Emergency Room and Healthcare, Vision, Moving, and others.

A great real-world example of a successful AI tool that helps with reputation management is Podium’s AI Reviews, which harnesses the full power of Podium’s platform and AI capabilities to generate personalized review responses and automate the review-gathering process. Responding to reviews significantly improves your business’s SEO and online reputation, not to mention the increase in brand loyalty. However, it can be time-consuming. Podium’s Reviews has been shown to reduce the amount of time spent responding to reviews by 80%, which means you’ll be able to respond to more reviews in less time.

Proactive Reputation Management Strategies

The key to protecting your brand in a fast-paced digital world is shifting from being reactive to proactive. Taking a proactive approach to reputation management strategies will help you stay ahead of potential threats and ensure you’re prepared to weather any storms your brand might face in the future.

Here are a few ideas for proactive reputation management strategies you could implement.

Using AI to Predict and Prevent Reputation Crises

AI reputation management software has advanced predictive capabilities, which means it can recognize trends and patterns and warn you of potential threats before they turn into full-blown crises.

Implementing Proactive Communication Plans

Use surveys, group studies, and other research methods to really dig into what customers love about your company and what they dislike. Instead of waiting for feedback to come and then responding, you can proactively seek it out which will give you more time to plan your response.

Engage Your Audience and Respond to Customer Feedback

Engagement is key to building brand loyalty. You need to respond promptly to all feedback, positive or negative. AI can help with this by drafting responses to save you time and even responding to customers autonomously, engaging in conversations with them online.

Build Your Online Presence

The more touch points you have with customers, the better you’ll understand how they perceive your business. Using AI reputation management tools saves time so you can spend more energy focusing on building your online presence. Ensure you’re accurately representing yourself online by optimizing your website, developing your social media profiles, creating new content, and ensuring messaging is consistent across platforms.

Use Data to Drive Your Strategy

Monitoring comments, opinions, stories, and other content that has been shared on the web is one of the most important parts of proactive reputation management. AI reputation management tools can scour the web quickly to gather and analyze all relevant content. This enables you to make decisions based on real-time data so strategies are more effective.

Train Your Employees

Employees are essential to maintaining a good reputation. By training them to deliver excellent customer experiences, you can increase the number of positive interactions and reduce escalations.

Manage Your Online Reputation With Podium

When it comes to online reputation management, using a chatbot or virtual assistant to manage incoming inquiries can be a game changer. With Podium, our AI Employee works independently to accomplish day-to-day tasks like answering customer questions, following up with leads, sending review reminders, scheduling appointments, and more. Plus, you also get access to other AI-powered tools like Podium Reviews. This tool automates the review process by generating personalized review responses for you and automatically sending review invites and reminders.

Actively managing and responding to reviews will significantly improve your online reputation and build brand loyalty, both of which help create a buffer for your company against future problems that may threaten your reputation.

Want to see it in action? Watch a demo of Podium and learn how Podium’s AI reputation management tools can help grow your business.