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For most businesses, reputation is their most valuable and irreplaceable asset. Building a strong reputation can take years, and done right, it can help a business grow to new and more profitable heights. But reputation can be a fleeting thing, and just one wrong move can send your company’s reputation tumbling from those heights, often never to recover.

A carefully constructed risk management plan can help you avoid these disasters, especially when these three key areas are addressed:

* Have a plan. Don’t make the mistake of thinking “It won’t happen to me.” Take time to carefully plan out how you’d handle a reputation disaster the same way you’d plan out how to handle physical disasters against your business or its operations.
* Think before you post. When a customer complains, it’s easy to ire off a sarcastic comment. But how you react in the face of criticism — especially on broad social platforms — says a lot about your company and can make or break your reputation. Have a plan — possibly even including scripts — for how to respond on social sites, over the phone, via email or though other types of customer contact and make sure your employees know about your policy.
* Plan social media campaigns carefully. When you post on Facebook, tweet, share or post a pic on Instagram, you’re potentially posting to the world. Think through your social media campaigns carefully and be sure to play devil’s advocate to uncover possible ways your campaign could be misinterpreted to otherwise go horribly wrong.

Remember: Complaints can be — and usually are — reposted on multiple social sites, not just the one where the faux pas occurred. In fact, few things cause people to be more vocal than a complaint, and having the world as their collective complaint department makes sharing bad experiences easier and more tempting than ever before. Managing your company’s reputation can be complex and time-consuming, but considering the repercussions, it’s a crucial part of doing business.

In the U.S., every year tens of millions of dollars are spent mitigating the effects of cyber attacks on American businesses, and that doesn’t begin to take into account the devastating effects an attack can have on your business’ reputation. While big businesses like target have deep pockets to weather such storms, most small and medium-sized businesses do not. If you fall into that category, here are the steps you need to take to help prevent a cyber-attack on your business:

* Make sure you keep your antivirus software updated at all times and that your data is stored in a secured environment that adheres to the latest ISO security standards.
* Educate your staff about phishing scams and the hazards of clicking on an unknown site or downloading an attachment from an unknown source. Make sure they understand the increasing security risks posed by social media sites.
* If you hire a security consultant, make sure the firm is reputable and experienced so you feel confident you have the best controls in place for your business.
* Make sure you have a strong BYOD policy in place that limits the way personal computing and mobile devices are used with regard to work and work-related data.
* If you use off-site workers, look into a secure cloud computing environment that avoids storage of data on remote workers’ personal computers.
* Make sure your employees have a strong password that does not contain personal information and which features a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters for added strength. Change passwords every three to six months, and don’t recycle old passwords. It’s a hassle, but it’s well worth it.
* Make sure your security measures are as user-friendly as possible. Complex protocols like restrictive file-sharing policies are more likely to be ignored, which means more risks for your business.

Implementing these small steps takes time, but in the end, your business will be better protected against the rising tide of cyber attacks.

Risk management isn’t always inexpensive, but generally speaking, the costs expended in proactively managing risks can far outweigh the potential costs of liability exposures. Still, there are some steps you can take to help control the costs of developing a risk management policy, and they can also help you gain better insight into your business and its operations and exposures too.
The key to cutting costs is to identify your risks early on so you can begin developing the best policy from square one without prolonged delays that come from long periods of risk analysis and weeks or months of trial and error. Understanding your exposures early means you can devote more time to prioritizing your risks so the policy you ultimately put in place will be more customized to your needs.

So how do you develop an early understanding of your company’s risk exposures? Here are a few ideas:

* Talk to your insurance agent or broker. Insurance professionals are experts at identifying risks and assessing exposure levels, and they can be instrumental in the early phases of developing your risk management policy.
* Network within your industry association. People with experience in your field have unique “real world” perspectives that can shed considerable light on potential areas for review.
* Review customer and employee feedback. Both can yield a surprising wealth of information about your business from perspective you may not have considered. Solicit feedback through regular surveys.
* Read trade magazines and websites geared for your industry to learn about the risks others in your field have faced as well as the steps they took to address them and policy changes they made based on their experiences.

Taking these steps does more than cut costs; it also helps you develop a better understanding of the risks your company is facing, and that can help you run your business more efficiently — and more profitably.