Brand reputation management is both harder and easier than ever these days.
Why it’s harder: There’s a raging proliferation of channels where audiences can find content that reflects well—or poorly—on a brand. Those include, of course, social media platforms, where misinformation and hot narratives can spread like wildfire, and LLMs (large language models), which are changing user behavior by the second.
Why it’s easier: LLMs also offer functionality that’s helping marketers and PR pros raise the bar for modern brand reputation management. I’ll explore some of those in this post—with the caveat that a human hand at the QA controls is necessary for every single one of these initiatives.
Brand Monitoring With Speed and Scale
Marketers and PR pros can use LLMs for instant detection of sentiment shifts and crisis signals, monitoring millions of conversations across platforms. They can also aggregate these conversations to give higher-level insights into brand perception.
Some of these inputs include:
- Social media conversations
- News articles
- Industry forums
- Review sites
LLMs can also go where few marketers dare: dark social groups, messaging platforms and emerging networks. These are nooks and crannies of the internet that can help marketers identify trends that could develop into real problems without early preventative action.
I recommend that marketers and PR pros do more than use LLMs and other AI tools like Brand24 and MarketMuse on a regular basis; they should wield them in real time to detect potential backlash from controversial campaigns, leadership decisions or partnerships.
Crisis Management and Communications
Preparation is vital for crisis communications, and you can supercharge your prep with AI with the following initiatives:
- Train your preferred LLM on your brand’s existing PR and messaging guidelines for tone consistency; this will keep crisis messaging consistent across press releases, social media and internal statements.
- Feed LLMs your various audience segments and ask them to adjust the messaging accordingly. These segments can include investors, employees, customers and media contacts. Do the same thing for platforms (LinkedIn vs. X vs. a press release) and geographic regions that might require shifts in tone and/or sentiment.
- Conduct real-time audience sentiment analysis to adjust messaging dynamically as the crisis responses unfold.
Competitor Benchmarking
LLMs are well-suited to gauge your crisis response effectiveness vs. competitors. You don’t have to go on gut; LLMs can help you benchmark social media sentiment, media coverage and audience engagement. Not only that, they can help you identify and jump on white-space opportunities where competitors are failing in reputation management.
If your biggest competitor is trying to fight off a customer service crisis, for instance, you can start a campaign on your award-winning response time and resolution satisfaction metrics.
Wrapping Up
There are lots of ways LLMs and AI are changing things for the worse (hello, LinkedIn feed), but the tools are genuine gold for anyone with a stake in brand reputation management. Along with the recommendations above, and a reminder that you should never simply let unvetted LLM content without at least one expert human reviewing it closely beforehand, my best advice is to stay fluent with the tools as they evolve to discover more uses to benefit your job—and your brand’s good name.
Kelly Ayres is Director of SEO at Jordan Digital Marketing.
[Editor's Note: PRNEWS recently hosted an online workshop, Artificial Intelligence for PR, for those who would like to learn more about how to embrace AI's potential in their organizations and in their own work. Sign up to watch the half-day event on deman here.]