8 Steps to Help Protect Your Brand’s Reputation in a Volatile Digital World
Today’s world is online and instantaneous. When it comes to social advertising, brand safety issues aren’t an if, they are a when. Today’s brands face more reputational risks than ever before. Platform volatility, such as boycotts and constant algorithm tweaks and changes, has made it more difficult for marketers and brands to navigate and safeguard their online reputation. Combine that with rising consumer expectations, and brands are now feeling increased pressure to uphold trust and accountability.
Protecting your brand strategy is always evolving. It requires collaboration, foresight, and planning. Here’s what you need to know in order to create effective brand safety guidelines for a social-first world.
What is Brand Safety?
Brand safety is any strategy you use to protect your brand health and reputation from external impacts. While it can apply to offline, our world is so digital that today, brand safety mostly revolves around how your brand is perceived online.
For the most part, brand safety has focused on preventing your ads from appearing alongside offensive content, such as content that promotes hate speech or violence. It’s important for good reason; 80% of people worldwide say they would reduce their spending on products shown near violent content.
But brand safety goes beyond avoiding adjacency to extreme content. It includes protecting long-term brand reputation by ensuring your content shows up in environments that support your brand’s values and audience’s trust, plus helps promote sustainable growth. It’s also about being able to quickly respond to negative sentiment in an effective manner, whether it’s smoothing out smaller situations before they become a mountain of issues, or having good crisis management.
Why Brand Safety is Important
This question is pretty easy to answer because of your bottom line. Failing to protect your brand’s reputation online can result not just in people thinking poorly of your brand, but it can lead to financial loss too.
A proactive brand safety plan is the only way to truly mitigate risk on social platforms. Risk is a natural part of adopting any new social network, feature, or tool. If you let that risk stop your brand from hopping on the latest social marketing advancements, you can risk your brand falling behind competitors.
Each brand and industry is unique and so are the potential safety threats to your brand. But some of the most common threats include:
- Paid social ads appearing alongside harmful or damaging content
- User-generated content featuring false claims about your brand or product
- Scandals involving creators or influencer marketing partners who weren’t properly vetted
- Generative AI that can lead to deepfake scams where criminals impersonate your brand or senior employees online
- Internal missteps, such as content that might be ill-considered and leads to a negative response
Brand Safety Across Your Social Channels
Before you can make any brand safety guidelines of your own, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the existing brand safety controls across the networks your brand is on. From Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, to YouTube and TikTok, platforms offer safety controls and/or guidelines and policies.
Once you understand how each platform handles brand safety, you can then begin to formulate your own personal brand’s safety guidelines.
Building and Implementing Brand Safety Guidelines Into Your Social Media Strategy
Documenting your brand safety guidelines will empower your team to take part in risk prevention strategies and hold everyone accountable. Here’s our brand safety checklist:
- Define brand standards. Write specific guidelines on what is inappropriate content. While the answer might seem straightforward at first, the more you dig into it, the more nebulous it becomes. So discuss with your team what is inappropriate and write up a clear guide. Also write up specific guidelines for influencer campaigns, AI use, and how your brand interacts with comments.
- Identify a point person for brand safety issues. While brand safety is everyone’s responsibility, it’s still worth assigning a dedicated person on your team who is primarily responsible for monitoring risks and coordinating response efforts.
- Outline a response strategy. Even the most preventable crisis can feel random when it strikes. Having an actionable, tiered response strategy will enable your team to work quickly and efficiently to address the situation based on severity. Create a crisis management plan that outlines the steps your brand will take in the event of a brand safety incident.
- Set up social listening. Thankfully, social media also doubles as a powerful risk detection and prevention tool. Through the use of social listening, you can identify risks, sentiment, and more surrounding your brand and industry. This allows you to identify potential controversies before they get out of control.
- Get everyone on board. It’s nearly impossible for a single team to stay on top of every potential risk or threat that may arise. To help maintain a positive brand reputation, get everyone in the company the resources they need to recognize a threat and either help stop it or bring it to the attention of those you’ve assigned to respond to threats.
- Set up content approval workflows. Prevent internal missteps by having multiple people sign off on content, from formulating the type of content you will share to proofing your drafted posts before they are scheduled to go live.
- Create a blocked words list. Keyword filtering automatically monitors, blocks, or flags specific words or phrases within your content or interactions. This is an effective way to avoid non-compliant language, which is particularly handy if you are operating in a highly regulated industry.
- Institute influencer brand safety tools. These tools are designed to help you find and vet influencers to make sure your influencer campaigns are safer for your brand. Many third party scheduling platforms offer vetting tools to help you find the right influencers for you. You can also do it the old-fashioned way by doing an interview-like process as well as researching potential influencers online.
Final Thoughts
Protecting your brand’s reputation online is important and should be the responsibility of everyone. Understanding each platform’s guidelines and tools, plus writing up your own brand’s clear guidelines is just your starting point. Implementing strategies that serve as guard rails, such as thoroughly vetting influencers and setting up a blocked words list, can help further your efforts to protect your brand online.
Need assistance creating guidelines and implementing brand strategies to ensure your brand’s online reputation? Tintero Creative is here to help your brand put the most positive foot forward online. From social listening, content approval workflows, blocked words, and more, we understand how important it is to have a good brand reputation.
Connect with us today to learn more about how we can assist your brand in creating and implementing a brand safety strategy.