One misstep in today’s competitive business world can be enough to lose customers and employees. Today, reputation is everything. Coinciding with this is a rapid increase in online events that have the sole intention of damaging an organisation’s reputation.
In such a reality, being able to access and gain insights from actionable, real-time data will put you one step ahead of the game and help mitigate any destructive forces against your reputation.
Why reputation matters
In 2020, Weber Shandwick, a leading global communications and marketing solutions firm, found that on average global executives attribute 63% of their company’s market value on their overall reputation.
On top of this, we now live in a world where the vast majority of consumers will research a brand before they commit to buying a product or service. A company’s digital presence, and the reputation of its brand and staff, factors into this decision-making process, determining whether the company in question is an optimum choice or not.
In fact, analysts at IDC have stated that one of the current key pillars of brand and reputation resilience is customer trust and loyalty. Customers, partners and suppliers use enterprise response to crises to measure the quality and integrity of an organisation and its leadership, the analysts state.
Events that can have an adverse impact on a company’s reputation includes conversations or false information about executive behaviour, environmental footprint or damage, political donations, societal issues, allegations of unethical practices, or employee safety.
The above example has been censored to remove identifiable features
Catching the problem before it snowballs
While preventative measures are always a good idea, as it stands it's impossible to catch everything before it's released into the world. Recent years have seen the rise of malicious attacks on everything from CEOs to SEO results, all with the intention of making a company look bad or perform poorly.
Using open source intelligence gathering tools like Signal offers multi-faceted help against such issues. When it comes to reputation, Signal can alert users to any mention of specific terms or names. This includes attacks against a company, any C-suite personnel, or discussions online about a current or potential attack on operations.
We highlighted this in action in our blog Black Hat Brags About Bank Hack - Signal Could Have Spotted It. In this example, Capital One, one of the biggest banks in the United States, discovered it had been hacked after a ‘white hat’ noticed the cyber criminals bragging about the breach - four months after the initial incident. The configuration vulnerability that the hacker had exploited was located and rectified, but not after approximately 100 million people in the US and 6 million in Canada were impacted.
Signal could have caught the issue immediately. Our machine learning driven relevancy engine can draw an analyst’s attention towards critical incidents amidst thousands of irrelevant posts. We scan the web and dark web for chat about data hacks, breaches and stolen information. Monitoring multiple data sources, we can provide real-time results and feed this back to your organisation so you can take practical steps to deal with an incident that could cause reputational damage immediately, before your brand is impacted. Proactive alerts can be activated via email, SMS, our mobile app or through one of the many integrations available.
Ultimately, reputation can spell the difference between your company’s success or a massive stumbling block. Uncovering what people are saying about you can highlight the potential negative impact of malicious keyboard warriors and give you the chance to respond, and it can uncover more sinister threats against your business. Regardless of the specifics, the power of visibility can’t be understated, and that’s exactly what we’re proud to offer.
Contact Signal to learn more or schedule a demo.