According to a Business 2 Community article, fake news is today’s hot topic. Social media helps to spread a wide distribution of fake news, quickly and easily. And the effect on reputation management is noticeable. How do you as an organization deal with fake news and what should you take into account? Together with Reputation Specialist Danielle Janssen, we’ll give you a number of tips for online reputation management and the impact of fake news.
Disinformation disguised as news is frequently spread throughout websites, social media and even through traditional media. Along with this, we’re also dealing with the clickbait phenomenon, which is used by the news media to achieve a greater reach. Newspapers that use words such as “groundbreaking” in their headlines often become well-shared. Research that was published in Science even shows that false information is 70% more likely to be spread further. The reason for this is mainly that fake news evokes more emotions in the reader.
It’s clear that we’re dealing with a major challenge here in the field of reputation management. But exactly how big is the impact of these sources that spread this fake news? We’re happy to provide you with these 4 tools to get you started in dealing with these new challenges.
Make sure to firmly immerse yourself into a source’s potential impact
Within reputation management, it is important to realize and understand the full extent of a source’s impact. Despite a smaller reach, the Financieel Dagblad can, for example, have much more impact in the financial sector than when the news is distributed via another newspaper with a larger reach. The smaller reach of the source is then directly opposite to the impact that the source has because it is a certified source.
News reliability can be based directly on your statement
A pitfall in the distribution of fake news is that organizations don’t always know what to do, so they do nothing at all when incriminating (fake) news is released. Realize that, with a statement, you can do something about this.
With reputation management, you can cover, for the most part, what news regarding your organization seems credible or not. Is your organization running into environmental problems, for example? Then you can actively promote what you are doing with regard to this. Opening up (pro) active and honest communication yourself helps people to be able to judge whether any news regarding your organization coming from other sources is credible or not.
Take matters into your own hands: the wonderful world of data for online reputation management
The importance of data with regard to reputation management continues to grow. More and more tooling and data tracking are coming onto the market. The amount of data that organizations have at their disposal is continually growing. The demand for tooling, to be able to collect all that data and gain insights from it for data-driven decisions from management, is therefore increasing.
Tooling can also help your organization with regard to fake news. The closer you keep an eye on your reputation and the sooner you are aware of what is going on regarding your brand, the faster you will be able to respond to it and steer it in the right direction.
