Reputation Management Examples for Corporate Comms Professionals

Managing and enhancing your brand’s reputation is a constantly evolving process. As a corporate communication professional, it can often be helpful to analyze reputation management examples from outside your organization to draw inspiration and reflect on best practices.

Proactively managing your reputation can help you identify and measure emerging narratives within social and traditional media. In the best cases, proactive reputation management allows your team to capitalize on these trends, and thus shape the narratives and strategically embed your brand story where appropriate.

Let’s start by mapping out the methodology of reputation management and then discuss some stellar reputation management examples we’ve seen so far in 2024:

What is reputation management?

Reputation management refers to the process of monitoring and shaping public perception and narratives around an organization’s brand. A strong focus on reputation management can help corporate communicators detect emerging narratives early in their existence in the digital discourse. This allows them to mitigate the potential downsides of negative or threatening narratives. Alternatively, it enables brands to pounce on trends that could spur increased customer engagement and revenue opportunities.

The importance of an online reputation management strategy

An effective online reputation management strategy is essential in today’s world. The online discourse moves at lightning speed. A single quote, comment, or clip can spawn thousands of online conversations and news stories. 

That’s why corporate communications and PR teams need to have infrastructure in place to move at the speed of the Internet. The right strategies and software can help you:

• identify and analyze fast-moving narratives from fragmented platforms in real-time,
• uncover the context around emerging narratives to help inform responses and decision-making, and
• show the impact of your reputation management efforts with real data.

Many comms pros are turning to a strategy led by narrative intelligence, a solution that leverages the power of machine learning to help detect, decipher, and react to online narratives.

4 reputation management examples from 2024

We often associate reputation management with reacting to a scandal or negative storyline. But a reputation management strategy is so much more than crisis response.

Upholding and enhancing your brand reputation also includes positive interactions with your audience. It could be tastefully joining an online trend or finding creative ways to spread your brand’s differentiators.

Here are four brands that got it right:

Four Seasons: Turning a viral moment into a brand story

There’s a good chance you’ve seen the viral TikTok that spawned this storyline. A mother asks her children a simple pre-vacation question: “Who’s excited to go to Four Seasons Orlando?”, to which a one-year-old baby cheerily exclaims, “Me!.”

The video has been viewed nearly 70 million times. But perhaps even more impressive was the response by the corporate communications and public relations team at Four Seasons.

Four Seasons quickly produced a stitch of the video that garnered another 5.5 million views for their corporate account. They also rolled out a VIP experience for the family and produced a behind-the-scenes TikTok that generated 7.5 million views.

When an opportunity to build goodwill and customer trust arrives at your door, it’s important to react quickly with a response that keeps the momentum going.

H&R Block: Piggybacking off a silly meme trend

Here’s another example of a brand riding a social media wave to boost its reputation. ICYMI: social media users perpetuated a tongue-in-cheek joke about all men being obsessed with the Roman Empire.

Normally, there wouldn’t be much crossover between a tax services company and a meme-worthy social media trend. But the team at H&R Block got creative. The company’s social media team produced content about how the Romans invented the practice of taxation to join in on the fun.

Small measures like this can help your brand stay relevant and current. You likely won’t try to insert yourself into every viral trend, but a robust understanding of the social media landscape can help your brand jump in when the time is right.

Samsung: Capitalizing on a competitor’s misstep

Apple’s advertising team rarely seems to miss, but their recent “Crush” ad could be labeled a stumble. The ad depicts a trash compactor-like device that crushes a variety of art-related items — a record player, instruments, chess pieces, etc — to show off the thin and sleek nature of the iPad Pro.

It didn’t go over well; social media users and members of the creative community spoke out against the ad, citing sensitivity over the role artificial intelligence plays in replacing creatives. 

This backlash created an opportunity for one of Apple’s chief competitors, Samsung. Their marketing team quickly created their “Uncrush” ad, a direct response to Apple’s ad that instead declared “creativity cannot be crushed.” The new ad received applause from both creatives and advertising pros alike.

Samsung was able to swiftly respond and position itself as a creative-friendly, socially-conscious brand amidst a backlash towards its rival.

Lockheed: Leveraging Generative AI for executive communications

Reputation management isn’t always tied to a singular event or viral moment. Sometimes, the best reputation management examples come from the day-to-day work that goes on behind the scenes.

Lockheed Martin, the global security and aerospace company, has been experimenting with AI tools to help spur social engagement for content from the company’s top executives. The company leverages custom GPTs that help prepare executives for media interviews, draft social content for them to post, and even generate first drafts of speeches. Human oversight is always part of the process, but AI helps the company draft responses faster and write more engaging content.

Communications professionals have enough on their plate; if they can use AI to help speed up some typically manual processes, it gives them more time to focus on strategic decision-making.

The right solution for your reputation management strategy.

These reputation management examples provide a variety of scenarios to show how top communications teams are enhancing and upholding their brands.

Executing your brand management strategy doesn’t have to be a burden on your shoulders. PeakMetrics is a narrative intelligence solution trusted by communications pros across the globe. Using cutting-edge narrative machine learning practices, our platform integrates with your current data pipelines to help you navigate the fragmented digital landscape and quickly build executive-level reports and strategic action plans.

Discover how PeakMetrics can help you anticipate threats before they escalate and seize opportunities before they slip away. Request a demo to learn more.