When you find out that people have been chattering about you or your company, positively or negatively, you want to check it out immediately. Once you have, almost 90% of the time, you wish you hadn’t. It is often negative, and most of the time there simply is not that much you can do about it. However, there are a couple of things you can do and this article covers pretty much all of the options.

After you get over the initial shock that someone said something negative about your brand, the first thing you should do is decide if the criticism is valid. Does the comment expose a weakness in your product or service? Did you actually do something wrong to prompt a negative reaction? Is the comment an honest call for help or clarification? By answering these questions you are taking the first step in maintaining control of your brand’s online reputation.

For the most part, an online reputation manager’s advice to you in these circumstances is: Don’t respond. If you do, respond only once, in a positive way, in hopes of reconciling. What you don’t want, though, is to make Google think that this one blog or forum post is important.

There is one variable in reputation management that never fails to be mentioned, regardless of what issue, campaign, or company is being discussed. Timing. How quickly can they get it done? How quickly does the client need their damaged reputation repaired? Etc.

Now – you cannot delay in responding to comments or issues that concern your business. Timeliness is critical. This is true for both publicly posted and private comments (which can easily become public-Wikileaks, anyone?). If the comments are negative, you have an opportunity to immediately address and resolve the issue.

Reputation management is, now more than ever, expected to be more responsive. Clients expect that their reputations can be repaired much more quickly than “a few months”.

If there is one thing the Internet is known for, it is besmirching otherwise spotless reputations. This is because the Internet is ruled by nothing other than our consciences–and within the deep, dark, corners of the Internet where anonymity reigns, it is both popular and useful to malign other people, companies, and organizations. This Business Insider article makes a good point about your good reputation being one of the few things that people can take from you without legal recourse, assuming they do it online, so it makes sense that having an online identity is not just a question of popularity and image now, it is one of security.

We all know that our “presence” online continues to grow and at the same time, your reputation online is becoming ever more important. Just think about how much effort people are putting right now into blogging (myself included), answering questions on Quora, tweeting on Twitter, checking in on Foursquare, reviewing places on Yelp and Qype as well as communicating on Facebook.

The author of the Business Insider article is quite correct–online identities are already important. The good news, and bad, is that online identities are going to become even more important in the coming years. That is a prediction you can take to the bank–certainly no one can say how much more important, but Internet reputations will undoubtedly become more important in coming weeks, months, and years. As a consequence, search engine reputation management is only going to increase in importance too.

More and more information is being put online every single day. This includes more and more private information about people, including you. There are now directories full of personal information about you and most of the people you know, sort of like an Internet phonebook, but with even more information involved. Quora, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook–using social networks like these has become the norm, rather than the exception. But the information you publish there is not within a contained system, other organizations and websites can either gather or purchase information about your profiles on those social networking sites.

Paul Jozefak, in this article, does a good job of breaking down why this is important and why so many people, who have nothing to hide, care so much about this issue. It is good to see that some people, Jozefak amongst them, understand why this is an issue, even to people who do not have anything whatsoever to hide from the public at large. It is an issue of privacy and not wanting to be unfairly defamed in an atmosphere, the Internet, that offers no legal protections.

If you are graduating from college, this is a good piece of advise. Pay attention what is being said about you online, which pictures you are tagged in, and who can see the entries on your blog. All of this can have a profound effect on your future career.

Earlier this month, 900 graduates of Missouri Southern State University and Pittsburg (Kan.) State University began the search for a job.

Along with sending out resumes and buying suits for interviews, the graduates were given an additional charge: “Clean up their digital dirt.”

Many employers look at your online reputation, this has been proven by survey after survey. The only way to fix the problem once it has gotten out of control is to contract some reputation management services firms and see which one has the most effective methods for the most reasonable prices. However, this is no quick fix–it takes time and patience.

When people think of the reputation management industry, they usually think of CEOs and celebrities as being the main clients. However, one demographic that is routinely ignored is automotive dealers. They make up a good deal of the industry’s clientele, with almost every dealership engaging in some form of reputation management. A recent survey, by AutoUSA, brought this fact to the forefront of the industry’s mind.

the survey found that many dealers are actively involved in online reputation management. More than 85% of survey respondents say their dealerships manage online reputations by following up on consumer opinions posted online, with 62.3% saying they have a well managed program and 23.2% saying their program is not well managed and they only follow up on a limited basis.

Automotive dealerships need to pay special attention to their online reputations because of the hyper-competitive atmosphere of the industry. Cars are big purchases and that means that people pay special attention to the process when they’re buying one, but it also means that dealerships have to convince the customer that they offer the best deals and services.

A while back I brought news about a company and website called Unvarnished. They were bringing forward this terrible idea forward that people should be able to anonymously review other people. Despite the chorus of boos they were met with, Unvarnished has captured the attention of the press and of bloggers, and raked in a reported $1.2 million in investments.

The self-described reputation management site, which allows professionals to anonymously submit reviews on their peers, has just renamed its site to “Honestly” and raised $1.2 million from several high-profile firms including First Round Capital,  Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and Charles River Ventures. The round also includes individual investors, like Joshua Schachter, Travis Kalanick, and Richard Chen.

An early round of investments like that could help Unvarnished/Honestly go a long way online. The idea, most online reputation management specialists maintain, is a bad one–but it continues to capture the attention of various investors and press outlets.

Online review sites have become a problem for many industries–including hospitality, restaurant, and virtually any other service industry. It is a good thing that when restaurants have bad service, they are outed–this is an appropriate use of reviewing sites.

However, there is certainly a different way that online review sites get utilized. Much of the time, an online review website is used as a weapon against a particular business. Reviews are often so scathing that they border on delusional or unreasonable. Things that people would never say in public, they are comfortable saying behind the shroud of anonymity. This is the ugly side of online review sites.

This, of course, has a major effect on the industry of reputation management–in which a company or person tries to shield their reputation, online, from nefarious comments from business rivals, disgruntled employees, or random online lurkers.

Is the concept of the online reputation dead? Certainly Mike Arrington at TechCrunch thinks so, and the author of the Telegraph article linked below agrees with him. However, the average person will see a negative comment about them on Google and will not shrug and say, “oh well, you know them Internets!” Rather, they will be concerned, frustrated, perhaps even outraged.

Any individual who is unfairly maligned onlineis going to want to fix the problem. They will want people to find positive commentary on them, not negative comments. With sites like Unvarnished out there–where individuals can comment on other individuals anonymously–this is not a trend that is likely to disappear anytime soon. Luckily, Search Engine Reputation Management is not going anywhere anytime soon, either.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/7928259/The-internet-is-completely-useless-for-checking-out-people-and-businesses.html

Sepp Blatter is the new President of FIFA, the international committee in charge of futball/football/soccer, the sport known officially as association football. Blatter has been under scrutiny for the past two months or so because of a number of blown calls in the 2010 World Cup. What does this have to do with Google reputation management?

So you may have heard about Sepp Blatter’s inauspicious arrival on Twitter. If you haven’t, here’s a summary: The FIFA president signed up in June. He tweeted. He promptly got over 20,000 followers, many of whom sent @replies stating how much they disapproved of him and his organisation.

The rest of the article is well worth a read, even for people who could care less about Sepp Blatter or the International Soccer scene. The author derives four lessons from the story, all of which are well stated.

http://www.heavychef.com/4-lessons-sepp-blatter-taught-us-about-online-reputation-management-on-twitter/