Strategic Communication for Reputation Management

Course Overview:

Corporate reputation produces competitive advantages when the strategies created for its management are pointed at a positive shift in its sustainability. Communication strategies support the overall management of reputation. With the help of social media, the managerial process becomes interactive and includes dialogues and interactions between the organization and various stakeholder groups with which it maintains relations. In this highly interactive course, you will learn how reputation management combines elements of strategy, management, marketing, customer service, communications, and human resources. The process of reputation management involves aligning the goals, values, and behaviours of your organization to build credibility and trust among stakeholders. 

Course Objectives:

At the end of this course, the participants will be able to:

• Accurately identify the strategic impact of communications on reputation
• Measure and map stakeholder perceptions including social media sentiment
• Write a communications plan to defend and develop a reputation
• Produce a reasoned reputational defence plan and implement it
• Deliver business excellence for organizational reputation alignment

Course Coverage:

Topic 1: Developing a World-Class Reputation Management Culture:

• What is reputation and how is it valued?
• World Class Organisations –common traits and Practices
• Reputation audits – what they reveal
• SWOT, PEST, and Reputation
• The strategic drivers of reputation
• Map your desired reputation

Topic 2: Organisational Alignment:

• Compiling stakeholder interest inventories
• Opinion measurement and monitoring
• Stakeholder mapping
• Identifying touch points and moments of truth
• Internal alignment
• Testing for organizational alignment

 Topic 3: From Organisational to Communications Strategy:

• Strategy, its function, and development
• Outlining the elements of your strategy
• Matching strategy to tactics
• Channels and their use
• Mapping stakeholders to channels
• Message control and Organisational alignment

Topic 4: The Reputation Toolkit:

• Identifying the appropriate reputational levers
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Issue management and environmental scanning
• Crisis reputation management - Spokesperson selection and training
• Business and reputation recovery
• Influencer relationships

 Topic 5: From Planning to Successful Practice:

• Process mapping and control – the core of planning
• The elements of a successful plan
• Your plan – construction and critique
• Persuasive presentation
• Selling your plan to senior decision-makers

Targeted Participants:

• PR Specialists
• Communications specialists (internal and external)
• HR professionals with a concern for the impacts of reputation
• Departmental managers
• Project managers