Personal branding is a chaotic process that can involve many risks. The biggest risk attached to personal branding is that the bigger your brand gets, the higher your chances of attracting negative opinions and sentiments become. Sometimes, these sentiments can break the brand as well as the whole business or occupation that was built on it.
In short, attracting negative publicity is a huge risk for personal brands. The probability and magnitude of this risk demand the celebrities and influencers behind these brands to pay attention to managing and mitigating this risk.
Personal branding experts use a mix of techniques to minimize the chances of such attacks on reputation and to recover from them quickly. One technique is to build a brand that is only slightly vulnerable to such attacks. It must be noted that no online reputation management strategy can guarantee to make your brand completely invulnerable to negative publicity and negative public sentiments. However, the impact of such sentiments can be minimized to a certain extent.
Brand reputation resilience building is a strategy that starts with building trust to minimize the impact of negative opinions and other reputation crises. It also prepares the influencers with the adequate method and approach to face the crisis and communicate effectively. Under this strategy, the personal branding consultants train these professionals to deal with the online content effectively and promptly and develop and propagate well-thought-out responses to these attacks.
Here is how brands can build reputation resilience.
Stick to Your Morals, Always
People assume building brands is about delivering results over and over again without fail. They can be right about this, but you need to know what those results are that you are focusing on and what standards you should use to judge the performance to deliver these results, right? Knowing the standards of performance is the first step that you must accomplish in building resilient brands.
Get clarity on what you do, the people that matter, and the impact you want to make with your efforts. Using your personality and belief system as a mirror, define your ethics and standards that you will always use to track the influence you are making. Uphold these morals in every decision and strategy.
Be Authentic
People will advise you to fake it till you make it, but you know better than to follow this advice. If you want to present a confident persona in your craft, you cannot fake it unless you want to risk your reputation.
Does it mean you can’t take challenges? No, it doesn’t, but you have to declare challenges as challenges and learning opportunities rather than as something easy for you. A more authentic approach is to maintain and present a growth mindset that allows mistakes and learning curves.
Keep promises aligned with your efforts and strengths. Know your weaknesses and build a practice that can survive despite them. At the same time, commit to improving your craft, continuously.
Own Your Mistakes
You may criticize your mistakes too harshly and may feel the tough repercussions from the public on your flaws, but you must acknowledge that mistakes are part of life. In branding, mistakes come in an even brighter light because they let the masses see your human side allowing them to relate with you even more.
Although mistakes give a unique feeling of authenticity, they are only beneficial to those brands and celebrities who have the emotional courage to own their shortcomings. Own your mistakes and weaknesses as a path to improve yourself and your presence. Also, own them so people can get over these issues and look at the bigger impact you are making.
Build Trust
You can build trust by sharing a bit about your personal choices, lifestyle, blessings, and hardships. Originality is a significant trust-building factor in personal branding efforts. Moreover, if you are authentic and honest about your work and can communicate honestly and frankly when people appear to be against you, you will automatically gather a trusting following.
Top this earned respect by sharing your vision about the work and your viewpoint about the shared development in the industry. Learn to bring people along with you on your journey to success to build a sense of belongingness among the masses that will turn into trust in the long run.
Make People Your Strength
Only mature celebrities and authorities understand that it’s not online reputation management skills, marketing prowess, or skills that make their brands. Instead, their brands are based on the people who follow this brand. Your brand survives and thrives until the trust of your people rests with it. If this trust perishes, it takes your brand along with it.
Honor the impact of your people on your brand by building an air of mutual respect and understanding with your tribe. You will want to meet with your followers, stakeholders, employees, and competitors to understand them and be understood.
Always remember that respect and compassion are keys to human relationships.
Strengthen Relations
Build one-to-one relationships with influencers in your field. Utilize collaboration opportunities with fellow brands to build rapport. Show up, be professional, and keep up your work ethic to cement your authenticity in the minds of your fellows.
The same goes for your fans and followers. Uphold high standards of interpersonal communication when you are in public and conversing with your fans and followers. Let them trust you beyond your professional expertise. It’s easy for the masses to forget the industrial expertise one possesses, but they will remember one’s kindness and humanity before judging.
Learn Online Reputation Management
It’s easy to get distracted in the wake of crises, but you need to keep our cool and manage. Learning a few communication skills to manage your brand reputation will go a long way in recovering you from publicity and brand management crisis.
Wrapping Up
Brand reputation management needs more than just creating content and spreading the word about your work, you also need to shield this brand against unwanted attention. Know that such attention is not entirely avoidable, so you need to take a step further to make it resilient in the face of such a crisis.
A brand’s resilience is its ability to recover from negative publicity and regain its traction quickly. Most resilient brands are reborn with more rigor and energy after negative commotion about them. They do so by using tested brand resilience strategies.
