When it comes to managing risk, businesses are increasingly finding the landscape shifting under their feet. As a result, managing risk has become a much larger consideration – and even a priority – for companies in any category. Online never sleeps, and neither do detractors nor competitors apparently! But fear not – we have ways to help businesses manage risk scenarios and gather actionable intel in the process. Let’s see how that looks!
Being proactive about risk is a must – but where does one start? According to the infographic below, the conversation about risk is vast, keeping industry leaders awake at night for good reason. It takes companies well beyond risk management to encompass identifying emerging and potential risks, while reducing risk in its many iterations. This includes risks facing investors, customers, and product development – as well as the risks and uncertainties inherent to any market.
Why is managing risk so top-of-mind? Because it touches every aspect of an organization, so assessing risk on all fronts is mission critical.
Modern-day Risk Assessment
The variety of risks that businesses face has grown and at the same time, the rate at which these risks appear has accelerated as well. This makes for an unfortunate combo. Whether we’re considering risks associated with policy, supply chain, or company reputation, businesses find themselves set upon by new threats each and every day.
To combat these challenges, companies need to stay updated on all operational fronts – from every source. And this is even more challenging than it sounds, as the sources of these threats evolve along with consumer and market shifts.
Conversations can happen across the social web, spanning not just social media sites, but also forums, blogs and review sites as well. And relevant intel is published and shared via global news media outlets, research publications, company datasets (including intel on new investments, mergers and acquisitions), earnings calls and more. And there’s even patent intel that can alert a business to emerging innovations.
And much like the data sources available, the threats themselves are novel. For example, some of the many questions businesses need to ask when navigating our always online and ever-changing world could include
- Is there a new competitor in an adjacent category who is planning to pivot into our space and steal market share?
- Are key opinion leaders and influencers angry or unimpressed with something we offer and about to create an online firestorm with their remarks?
- Is a supplier on the verge of creating a delivery risk for a critical client?
- Will a new public policy or trend impact our product desirability or our company reputation?
Today, we see more complicated supply chain challenges and impacts resulting from important social and political issues too. As such, risk teams have a hard time keeping up with the threats in real-time, as they can seemingly come out of nowhere. And if one doesn’t know where to look, how can you set alerts to monitor conversations for them?
Proactively Managing Reputational Risk
There are an overwhelming number of risk signals barraging a business’ data channels – signals that could reveal key intel to answer mission critical questions. But how does one keep track of what is truly relevant and separate the signal form the noise?
Traditional methods or spreadsheets can’t keep up with the pace of change. And if brands overlook the wrong threat, that can result in a big problem – one that can grow exponentially. And this is why proactively managing reputational risk is essential.
NetBase Quid’s advanced AI helps businesses capture relevant consumer and market intelligence that leads to data-driven decision-making that touches every corner of their organization. Proactively identifying and managing risk requires catching risk indicators at their inflection point, and this means businesses must have continuous, real-time intelligence that they can bet the bank on.
By tracking risk continuously in real-time, teams will identify threats and can then take immediate action to get out ahead of a narrative and shape the conversation – or capture a first mover position in a tight market. Better still, when using our Intelligence Connector, companies can pull our aggregated data source insights into their own business intelligence dashboards to analyze combined metrics all in one place.
This means combining proprietary intel with more than 300 million sources of data across all social channels and data sets including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Premium Lexis-Nexis News, Blogs, Forums, company profiles, patents, and more. And then analyzing it all using best-in-class AI that’s continuously updated to keep customers on the cutting edge of available analytics technologies.
And this Intelligence Connector is a logical next step for proactive risk management, as the risk factors relevant to one business are unique and require nuanced analyses. The category and company criteria our customers use to extract and perform proprietary analyses are collaboratively designed. This way, we help facilitate capturing the broadest set of consumer and market data – so they can rapidly boil it down to focus on the metrics that make sense.
Risk Identification in Action
The process starts by identifying the list of risks to examine. This can be a list brands already have in place, or one they develop using the Netbase Quid® platform to identify emerging concerns using the datasets mentioned earlier.
From there, they select meaningful metrics to track againt each risk category. These might be the sentiment, passion, or custom metrics like volatility, negative embroilment and connectivity. These metrics are ranked and prioritized continuously in dashboards that are updated in real-time, always offering up-to-the-minute views. And it’s a dynamic process that allows adjustment on the fly as needs and markets change, keeping businesses on the cutting edge of not only risk, but also opportunities.
For example, by looking at three years of market data, one global retailer used Intelligence Connector to track reputation and public policy risks. They successfully. identified and monitored risks as well as trends negatively impacting reputation, sourcing, regulation, and partnerships. And best of all – their data-driven recommendations helped them reprioritize resources and this resulted in significant cost savings.
Another NetBase Quid® customer, a top consulting firm, leveraged the platform to track their customers’ supply chain risks. They ranked over 20,000 companies across important risk areas and key performance metrics, saving analysts time better spent on analysis rather than manual data capture. They successfully helped clients mitigate these risks and created powerful dashboards ranking metrics that were updated in real-time and shared via white labeled reports.
Managing risk is not only incredibly informative and game changing for businesses, but it’s also an impressive value-add for the agencies offering it. Whichever scenario applies to you, reach out for a demo so we can show you these impactful options in action!
