Managing Your Online Reputation: Lessons from NZ’s Largest Manufacturers

In business, first impressions matter. New research by NZ Manufacturer magazine business advisor and director of Auckland online reputation management agency Impact PR, Mark Devlin, has found many of the country’s manufacturers are failing to manage their online reputation – an oversight that could have repercussions for their growth.

Photo / Getty

For manufacturers, business relationships can be multi-faceted and, given the technical nature of the industry, at times they can also be highly complex. 

Whoever your target consumer is when you enter a business relationship at some level, even a rudimentary transactional one, you need them to have confidence in your brand from the outset – a promise you can deliver in a way that aligns with their understanding of what constitutes value.

If you fail to reassure a potential customer that you can adhere to this expectation, your chances of entering a relationship are greatly diminished.

I recently toured a local manufacturing facility where I was shown a piece of cutting-edge technology destined for the export market that was worth around $1 million.   

This is not an insignificant amount of money to spend on a single product and it occurred to me that if I was buying something of that value from an overseas company I would want to have the highest level of trust in that firm.

This begs the question – how does a manufacturer create digital ‘trust signals’ so that when a potential customer, employee or other stakeholder begins to research their company, it provides the requisite reassurance necessary for them to move to the next stage of interaction and purchase?

While all manufacturers have customers, few would have walked in their digital shoes to understand what they see during any initial desktop research process. 

At the same time, an even smaller number of customers will pass on the feedback that what they found online put them off progressing a purchase any further. 

Impact PR conducted a somewhat scientific study of New Zealand’s 50 largest manufacturers (by shipment volume) to better understand how well they managed their online reputation. 

The scope of this sentiment study included analysis of both the first page of Google as well as that of Google News. Each of these two pages contains 10 search results. This is a total of 1,000 search results and each was manually reviewed and categorised.

Essentially this gave us a ‘first impression’ view of how a potential customer would see and evaluate a manufacturing firm from their online presence. 

While most of us will be familiar with Google’s standard search results, Google News, a news aggregator, is a valuable measure of what others are saying about a firm – usually, this manifests as news articles.

The acid test we applied here is whether there is anything on the first page of search results that may be considered negative or in some way be detrimental to the image of the company. 

The Results

You may be forgiven for assuming that large, well-resourced manufacturers with teams of experts dedicated to maintaining their reputation would have impeccably well-manicured search engine results.

The results of the study tell a different story.

Of the 50 manufacturers we looked at, almost a quarter (24%) had a negative piece of content on the first page of their search results. 

This type of content included; details of court cases or convictions (including Commerce Commission rulings), negative employee reviews, media stories about financial loss, negative content within their Wikipedia page and the impact of natural disasters on business operations. 

When we look at their Google News results, the proportion of large-scale manufacturers with negative content increased to 48%. 

One of these companies had 80% negative content.

While there was some overlap with the first page of search results (ie media stories about financial loss/receiverships or legal stoushes) there was noticeably more diversity in the types of news angles found. 

Health & safety issues (including workplace fatalities and penalties awarded as a result), environmental concerns/pollution, misleading labelling, industrial action, a facility fire, executive bullying allegations, theft from the business, and restructuring leading to job loss were common themes.

Unfortunately for the businesses, some of these news articles dated from several years prior, even as far as 2015 in one case. 

So what can be done about it?

Increasingly we are being approached by companies wanting to own their online search results. While Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving, management of this digital real estate is achievable and prudent. 

Generally speaking, it is easier to control a search engine’s results than it is to control news media. This is because journalists are tasked with providing a balanced view of a story. 

However, there are strategies that can be implemented to allow a business to shape its online reputation. 

Creating a foundation of positive content is a great way to dilute any negative content that is present or may manifest in the future.

The first step is assessment. 

Have a look at your search results – what sort of image do they send about your company? How consistent is this with how you want your brand to be portrayed?

The second step involves remedial or, preventative action.

Here you may need to enlist a PR specialist for this one, who can help create a series of targeted news articles and seed these in media for you. As an example, our agency is a Google News publisher and can post positive content directly to the aggregator.

CSR initiatives are increasingly valuable as a mechanism for delivering good news stories about your brand. One of the manufacturers in our study produced a range of stories about their community initiatives that helped colour the brand effectively.

Another suggestion, the video appears in Google’s search results, consider getting a corporate video scripted, filmed and uploaded to YouTube – (tip it will need to be optimised for the search engine to ensure it ranks for your brand name).

The third step is the introduction of a regular programme of monitoring. 

Appoint someone either internally or use an external agency to keep an eye on online reputation and to flag any issues that arise. 

Your company’s online reputation matters, and investing resource into its management can help attract new customers. Make your reputation management a foundation part of your marketing strategy, and ensure that all employees are aware of the potential for their social media profiles to appear in search results about your company.

This article by Impact PR’s Mark Devlin appeared in the July 2024 issue of NZ Manufacturer Magazine.