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“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” - Winston Churchill.

News traveled at a snail pace and methodically before the advent of Internet. The communication channels have radically transformed since then, Internet being the most conspicuous one. Internet has gained the distinction of becoming the most preferred platform for finding information and the same is provided at lightening speed. Internet has an abundance of consumer generated media (CGM) in the form of forums, blogs, review sites, opinion postings, and many more; on any topic imaginable. With a plethora of self publishing options available to users, nothing is inviolable, including online reputation.

Building reputation, both online and offline, demand years of hard work and millions of dollars. It would be justified to say that reputation management is critical to any organization. Your brand is not immune to comments (positive, neutral or negative) in the public domain. People enjoy the liberty to talk about whatever they want and wherever they want. A lot of these discussions involve brands, products and services. A vindictive content has the potential to start an avalanche that could sully your reputation forever and thus online reputation management becomes essential.

Researchers have found that negative comments always look credible, even if they are frivolous or unfounded. There are numerous sites such as Rip-off Reports, Epinions.com, etc. which helps people voice their concerns vociferously. Negative press, in the form of discussion pages from these websites can show in search results, worse make it to the top ten. For the same reason, reputation management that belonged to the PR (public relations) domain since time immemorial, is proliferating into the realm of search engine marketing.

The power of search engine optimization could be leveraged to counteract negative publicity. The strategy is simple – displace offending search engine listings by favorable listings. Easier said than done. An extensive analysis of keywords and brand terms would help in assessing the extent of damage done. Promoting company's primary website in tandem with positive pages is a tried and tested technique and would delivery fruitful results. All these exercises (search engine optimization and social media optimization) could be coupled with efforts, to get the derogatory comments removed. Online reputation management companies also explore legal avenues or contact webmasters individually to accomplish this task.

'Prevention is better than cure' and preemptive online reputation management allows you to do it. Creating listening posts to track what is being said about your company, would help you in nipping trouble before it blows out of proportion. There are many online reputation monitoring tools which prove to be handy for doing this task and some of them are mentioned below:

Set up Google and Yahoo email alert for specified keywords.
Track message boards, forums and groups.
Use tools like Copernic tracker, Website Watchers, Watchthatpage.com to track changes made to particular web pages.
Create RSS feeds for designated keywords (Feedster, Technorati, Yahoo/Google news, MSN Spaces, Blogpulse, etc).
Use 'MonitorThis' that allows you to subscribe to results from 22 search engines and many more.

Companies should incorporate online reputation monitoring as a permanent function and not consider it as a counteractive measure only.

'Online reputation management ethics' is a widely debated topic. Is it ethical to help a business which is 'guilty as charged'. Doing online reputation management for innocent people, whose names have been tarnished by disgruntled customers, unhappy (ex) employees, etc. is justified and not against business ethics. Unfortunately, many online reputation management companies don't buy this argument and do business with anyone and everyone.

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