Reputation management: A driving force for action

Nowadays, along with the highly increasing importance of corporagte public relations, "reputation management" has been mentioned in the definition of public relations, especially by practitioners. It has been one of a key concepts not only for us to get a better understanding of corporate public relations, but also make sure that the corporate public relations sits right in the space where business and society meet in today's rapidly changing world.

According to the readings, corporate public relations are often given a different name in the real world such as "corporate communications", "corporate relations" etc. Actually, corporate public relations is complex and take responsbility for an organisations's most important asset and its reputation.

Recently, corporate companies are not all the big business or many government-owned business, but hospitals, charities,and educational institutions are all run on corporate line. Therefore, how to communicate with employees or stakeholders, how to achieve their intergrated goals, and how to make a proper organisation politics to manage these problems are some of the main tasks that a corporate public relations practitioner should to think about.

Well, reputation is inevitable in managing an orgnasation to achieve long-team objectives such as Rio Tinto,one of the largest mining companies which used a two-way communication and supported more than 2900 programs on community assistance. However, what really determines reputation is a crucial question. A lot of example cited that the stakeholder management is the heart and soul of corporate public relations and a positive stakeholer experieces can have an extremely good influence on reputation which contributed by him or her or their employees.Potentially, almost everyone in an organisation can contribute to overall reputation, whether positively or not.

It is clear that reputation plays an crucial role in corporate public relations, and how to determined reputation is also an important question for public relations to think about and helps organizational leaders to communcate effectively by coaching it and articulating key messages to all the employees in the company.