Globally, Data journalism has had a transformative impact on content publishing standards. Reporters, Journalists, Content writers, freelancers, social media users, bloggers, and website or content publishers need to carry out more accurate, transparent, and fact-led storytelling.

April 2 is an International Fact-Checking Day.

Google presents advanced ways on how can you find trustworthy information. Now, wherever you’re searching, you’ll see three dots next to most results on Google Search. Tapping those three dots gives you more about the background, why this page, who wrote this page and reviews from others. It will help you discover and establish more credibility for your searches. Also, these would populate organic search results not driven by paid ads.

Use the right strategies, access the right tools and follow techniques to gather and analyze information before publication. This is critical to maintaining your online reputation.

Responsible communications ensure you maintain and empower your online reputation. Building a strong online reputation requires a strategic and consistent approach. It helps you gain a competitive advantage, attract top talent, manage crises, engage with customers and influence stakeholders. Improved brand recognition enables you to win new customers, enhances customer loyalty and helps you build an overall increased market share.

While communicating, the tone of voice of your messages significantly impacts how the public perceives you and your brand. By using the right strategies, communicators can establish credibility, build trust, and engage the audience, ultimately increasing the effectiveness of their communication.

You can use the following best practices to develop your communication skills:

Transparency: Be candid, truthful and open in all communications. Try to provide accuracy to the information you are sharing and do it honestly. While in most cases, the juggle is when to make an announcement; it’s recommended to wait, announce, and publish what is definitive.

Promptness: Minimizing delays in reverting to customers or stakeholders in day-to-day communications helps establish more robust relationships. It demonstrates your readiness to handle projects and affirms your intent to the client for positive decision-making. Delayed transmissions lead to miscommunication or reputational harm.

Respectful: Interaction with customers and stakeholders demonstrates you and your personality traits. Dignity, respect and values are crucial to maintaining relations with professionals, staff, well-wishers, partners and media. In the social media era, there is little scope for ‘Being-on-stage’ or ‘Being-back-stage’. Hence, to maintain your online reputation, it is most effective to always communicate with respect. Paying attention to feedback and queries helps build your connections stronger across geographies.

Adapt Inclusivity Since the world is a stage now, one must learn to communicate inclusively. For years, we trained ourselves to speak with a particular group or a segment of people; now, you need to be careful in the choice of words, thereby not impacting or pointing towards any section of society. To ensure this, adopt Inclusivity in your approach. Make sure all members of your audience can access and understand your communication. Take into account any potential linguistic and cultural hurdles.

Consistency: To influence your customers and stakeholders and to establish your narrative or point of view as an expert, it’s essential to convey your ideas consistently. While consistent messaging does not mean repeated messages, it needs progressive consistency. Make sure that the message is delivered through all channels of communication always.

Take charge and be proactive: As a responsible communicator, you need to be able to think through and plan should there be any potential challenges or outcomes post your communications. Consider potential problems in advance and deal with them before they become more significant problems.

Improvisation:

1. Use feedback and data to pinpoint improvement areas to monitor and tweak your communications.
2. Employ straightforward, uncomplicated language that your audience can understand.
3. Avoid using jargon or technical phrases that could be confusing.

Citations:

Zraková, Diana, Kubina, Milan, and Koman, Gabriel. “Influence of Information-communication System to Reputation Management of a Company.” ScienceDirect, 22 Jun. 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.proeng.2017.06.172.

Oh, Jeyoung, and Ki, Eyun-Jung. “Factors affecting social presence and word-of-mouth in corporate social responsibility communication: Tone of voice, message framing, and online medium type.” ScienceDirect, 12 Apr. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.02.005.

Reach me at my email: rachana@mediavalueworks.com

About the author: Rachana Chowdhary

Rachana Chowdhary founded an innovative global communications agency – MediaValueWorks, in 2013. She has over 23 years of experience across traditional and digital media, PR, branding and marketing strategies, and strategic content management. A graduate of Mumbai University, she also mentors women entrepreneurs and small and medium businesses.