Lesson Outcome
You will understand and gain the skills to critically assess other businesses and ultimately your own online presence and how it is reflecting your firm
As well as understanding how you are perceived it is important to look at the way you are presenting yourself to the outside world.
What experience will people have when they view your firm from afar and then how does that experience change if they interact with you.
Traditionally a firm would have had a word-of-mouth reputation, a physical office and possibly paid advertising and promotion.
These would have made up what is effectively the firms “shopfront”. Now any business is managing multiple shopfronts or windows to the world many of these are online.
These would include:
- Your website
- Your Social Media Accounts
- Your Teams' Online Presence
- A wide Variety of Third-Party Websites which Will feature your firm
- your office space
Online Exercise
What do you see?
Imagine you wanted to find out about something or someone, think about the steps you might take.
Let’s imagine you did this for a another firm.
Work through the following steps:
Workbook exercise
Mystery Shop Exercise
The previous exercise will have helped prepare you to think about how you mystery shop your own firm. This can be a challenging exercise and you may wish to engage a range of people to help you to do this.
Reviewing your own firm can be hard as it can be more difficult to be objective. Also, you might be too familiar with what you are viewing to be able to view it with “fresh eyes” and be objective.
On a practical level when conducting web searches and other online activities you will likely have already visited these sites. Therefore, as much as possible try to conduct searches incognito or private versions of browsers.
At this stage you should focus on reviewing rather than fixing what you have.
Use your workbook to help you to mystery shop your firm.
practical guide
Using LinkedIn for Business
As a business, LinkedIn can be a valuable tool for promoting your employer brand. Using the downloadable resources below called 'Using LinkedIn for Business' you can follow the steps to set up and promote your company page.
What The Best Firms Do
- TAKING CONTROL
The best firms are aware of every place they are present online and take ownership of these sites have an active strategy for making these sites work for them.
They also make sure that they are only using channel which work for them. It is worse to have a Twitter account and not engage with it, than not to have a Twitter account.
during this lesson
You have learnt about the way your firm looks to the outside world. Insights from this will determine your next steps.
next steps...
When you are ready, move on to the next lesson using the button below.