Measurement Month: How are your communication efforts measuring up?

© John Schnobrich via Unsplash.com.

Over the years I have seen the positive contribution and impact that reputation research has had, not only within the communication field, but also corporate affairs and human resources. It is so important that the whole business sings from the same reputation hymn sheet to build a strong and positive reputation.

Measurement Month happens to also be my company's birthday month and in celebration of turning 14, here are 14 compelling reasons why reputation research matters:

Global focus on PR Measurement in November 2019

Ornico  29 Oct 2019

1. Bragging rights: With a high reputation score, an organisation shows the world that they are a reputable company. People and businesses want to do business with companies that have a good reputation and that they trust.
2. A positive reputation impacts your bottom line: People are more likely to spend their hard-earned cash on a reputable product or service, and be associated with a reputable brand.
3. Reduces risk research will proactively help you to identify gaps and risks within your business, helping you to avoid, or at least better manage and plan, for crisis situations.
4. Build closer relationships with your stakeholders: Measuring the relationship between you and your stakeholders will help you to build even better relationships with them.
5. Saves you time so that you can focus on your business: There is often so much that needs to be done within a business especially when it comes to managing stakeholders. Deciding where to start can often get quite overwhelming. Research will help you to determine what priority areas to focus on.
6. A seat around the boardroom table: As communication specialists, measurable numbers and metrics that provide strategic direction helps you speak the language of the C-Suite.
7. A solid foundation: Companies can do fancy marketing and public relations; spend a boat load of money on advertising, SEO, or the website; and do a lot of good community work, but if your basic reputation building blocks are not in place, you will be wasting a lot of time and money.
8. No more spray and pray approach to get your message across: The research results will help to pin-point priority areas to manage; confirm the key messages to communicate about; and identify the channels of communication that will be the most effective.
9. Communicate consistently: A company is either consistently good or consistently bad; either way, they are building a reputation. Research will help identify the blind spots.
10. Get your employees to be raving fans of your business: Employees are key brand ambassadors for the organisation. Understanding how they feel about the business will be telling of what family and friends also think of the business.
11. Build on your true value offering: Would everyone in the organisation describe it in the same eight words? Research helps to find ways of aligning everyone to the same purpose.
12. Saves you money: Research can save an organisation money in the long run by guiding the communication strategy and plan on the right areas of the business, making it more effective. It also helps to enhance key stakeholder relations, leading to business growth.
13. Investing in Awesome AfriCAN: This our corporate social investment initiative. When investing in a research project with Reputation Matters, an organisation also contributes to job creation and poverty alleviation, we train up members from the community with computer skills and teach them how to capture data and build websites for entrepreneurs.
14. Research could be free! We’ll gift you 10% off your next research project for every company that you refer to us that signs up for their own research study. Referring ten projects means a free research project for you!
15. Things that are important to you, you tend to keep track of, why not measure your reputation too? If you treasure it, you’ll measure it!