Reputation is a big part of running a successful business and while the scope of modern business has changed, with a major slant towards the Internet, word of mouth is still a huge consideration in the promotion and marketing of a company. Many people choose service providers and businesses based on recommendations or perceived recommendations of others. In some cases, this means asking friends or family but on the Internet this is extended even further; consumers take notice of online reviews and accounts to determine whether they should buy a product, use a service, or even employ a new team member.

Whether you’re looking for a new career or your business sells products locally you can benefit from an online presence. Even if you conduct your business offline, you should remember that many of your customers or employers will still conduct their research on the Internet because it is fast, convenient, and offers a wealth of information that is otherwise unavailable to them. As such, even local businesses can benefit from using online reputation management services.

Online reputation management services first determine those phrases and keywords that matter most to your business or you personally. This typically means your name, the name of your business, and the names of your products and services. It may also include domain names if they are different to other names, and aliases that you might regularly use.

Online reputation management services will then determine how well you perform for those searches and ensure that you are in complete control of the results that web users see when they search for you.

There are literally thousands of social networking websites, many of which offer very specific categories as well as broad networks that are used by anybody that wants to make new contacts on the Internet.

There are those sites that are used primarily for social purposes, making friends and catching up with existing friends, and there are also social networking sites for professionals (LinkedIn is the most popular example of this kind of site).

Anybody is able to post virtually anything on these sites for the world to see. Include blogs, groups, directories, and review sites and there are many tens of thousands of places where your customers, employees, and even employers are able to post their opinion on you or your business.

When a lead or a potential client searches for you it is usually these results that they will see first. For this reason, it’s important that you do everything you can to ensure that the most prominent results are the pages that you would like to be seen.

With so many sites and opportunities for bad press, it would be impossible to check every site manually. Fortunately, searching is what the search engines are best used for.

For an instant snapshot of your current reputation, you can enter your name in Google or Yahoo. You can try the same with your business name or your website name. You can even add the names of executives in your company in order to find out what people think of you and, more importantly, what others are reading about you when they research your name online.

Alternatively, adding your chosen keywords to MonitorThis lets you keep on top of all the results from 20 search engines and social search sites. What’s more, it’s free to use.

What does the new system of Facebook “likes” mean to the reputation management industry? Facebook is intending to use the data, but it is, as of yet, unknown exactly how they intend to use it. Over at a blog called SearchEngineLand they have an article which says, in part:

the vision here is a network of discovery tools and information that operate higher up in the funnel than search: what are my friends doing, where are they eating, what do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search. But it does represent an alternative way in many cases to discover information.Yet the mountains of data that Facebook will gain could improve Facebook search results and potentially the coming, new and improved Bing integration. At a simple level, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” sushi restaurants in New York and those liked by my social network it can show me that information in search results. That hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social and more of a “recommendations engine” than Google at this point.

The online reputation management business may have a tough time dealing with this development, should it ever come to fruition.

Reputation management has been considered an important part of business for decades, and it has recently come to the fore again thanks to the number of businesses and consumers that now use the Internet. What’s more, when we search for information about a company, product, or person, we are still more likely to use search engines than any other method of searching and finding information.

This combination makes it very important that we consider our search engine reputation. While the search engines themselves do not directly post a positive or negative spin on businesses or websites, they do display pages and websites that are relevant to specific search phrases. If, when people search for your business name, they find negative press at the top of the results they will not be inclined to deal with your or the company that you represent.

Search engine reputation management offers a means to bury any negative posts that appear in the results. Burying posts means consigning them to page 2 and beyond in Google and the other major search engines.

Ensuring that your site appears at the top of the results should be the first step. If you have your own blog then this should feature prominently too.

Following these personally owned sites, it is possible to have social networking profiles, articles, press releases, social bookmarks, and positive reviews feature in search results.

Search engine reputation management isn’t just about recovering from bad press either. It also means ensuring that when people do search for you or your company, they are faced with positive or informative results.

LinkedIn is one of many social networking platforms, but it is certainly the most popular one for business needs. Now, LinkedIn is enhancing the social networking experience by offering the ability to control who sees what information.

One of the most useful parts of Facebook has always been the ability to control which members of your network have access to which information. For example, you could set your filters so that your family and professional contacts were seeing different items and updates. LinkedIn has finally adopted this feature, giving users’ complete control over who sees which updates – whether it’s everyone, specific connections, a group you belong to or a specific user. Depending on how you use your LinkedIn statuses, this can be a really powerful way to target individual pieces of content toward the right audience. It gets rid of that firehouse effect that we often get trying to share information in social networking and ciphers directly into the group you’re most interested in reaching.

This is a smart move on LinkedIn’s part, it prevents prospective employers from Googling you and seeing information you do not want them to find (though you shouldn’t be putting that info on LinkedIn anyway). Basically, they’re offering individuals a chance to engage in their own personal web reputation management campaign.

http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/04/linkedin-increases-social-sharing-options.html

Unvarnished is a new site that purports to be like social networking site Yelp–but for individuals instead of businesses. The site has been roughly criticized in the press this past week because of concerns that the site will basically just turn into a place for misanthropes to participate in online defamation.

However, people won’t have the choice as to whether they’re reviewed or have the power to get reviews deleted. They may not even know others are writing about them, unless they seek out the site or the person reviewing chooses to have a courtesy email sent.

It’s not a total free for all though, with Unvarnished claiming they’ve introduced safeguards like an internal reviewer rating system, so people know which reviews to give weight to. People will also have the ability to respond to reviews.

I’m glad there is a system set up to safeguard against online defamation, I just hope its enough. Even Yelp has become an environment which allows for a good deal of online libel.

http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/04/06/2010-04-06_getunvarnishedcom_allows_users_to_anonymously_review_coworkers.html

Hotels are more dependent upon online reviews than most industries. TripAdvisor is the most respect online review website for that industry, and thus swings a lot of weight around on these issues. With 32 million unique monthly visitors and 15 million members, TripAdvisor is capable of making or destroying any Hotel’s online reputation. HotelInteractive has a great interview on the subject.

Social media is all about managing your hotel’s online reputation, and no platform wields more influence on travel decisions than TripAdvisor. Recently, I interviewed April Robb, TripAdvisor’s Social Media Program Manager, responsible for social media outreach, brand monitoring, and blogger relations. She offered up some great advice to hoteliers for managing online reviews.

Unlike most of the Internet and most review-sites, TripAdvisor also has a system to check fraudulent reviews.

http://www.hotelinteractive.com/article.aspx?articleid=16602

Hotels have become far more attuned to the needs, concerns, and complaints of their customers ever since the rise of reviewing websites on the Internet. This has made it possible for customers to spread their dissatisfaction and warn others, instead of just complaining to a recorded voice on a phone or yelling at some poor receptionist. The outlet, though, is easily abused by irrational customers, disgruntled employees, or even under-handed competitors. This results in what we call internet libel.

Hotel managers may ignore customers’ reviews at their peril, some analysts say. Others say they’re just another way for hotels to find ways of improving operations. And those who are paying attention and responding to customers can earn some goodwill points at a time every room night counts.

“It’s an opportunity to stand apart from your competition,” says Dean Schmit of Standing Dog, which developed software ReviewAnalyst.

Large hotel companies have always solicited customer surveys from guests. But they’ve relied mostly on numerical rankings and have rarely contained descriptive explanations.

So is it good that hotels are so much more responsive, or bad that they’re so easily attacked?

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2010-03-23-businesstravel23_ST_N.htm

Lindsay Lohan is pretty much constantly giving reputation management firms an example to point to and say “Don’t do this!” Her latest example is at least funny. She is attempting to sue E-trade because she claims one of their hilarious commercials featuring babies uses her name, and mocks her, without permission. Apparently the baby at one point says “That Milkaholic Lindsay”–and Lindsay Lohan thinks this borders on infringement.

Lohan’s lawyer says, “Many celebrities are known by one name only, and E-Trade is using that knowledge to profit. They used the name Lindsay. They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”

I have to say that I can see why she’s upset and they certainly were probably referencing her. However, if she thinks their is going to be no fallout from her suing a popular company with commercials about funny babies–then she is crazy. When this is all over, it will have created a good deal of negative press for her–much more than a funny baby from an e-trade commercial could dish out–and she’ll definitely need an international reputation management consultant.

http://www.sheknows.com/articles/814104/linsday-lohan-sues-e-trade-1

Italian prosecuters have pointed to Silvio Scaglia, the billionaire founder of FastWeb SpA, as part of the ring of a tax-evaders and money launderers.

Scaglia, being held in Rome’s Rebibbia jail, said today during his questioning that FastWeb was the “victim” of a scam, his lawyer Pier Maria Corso told reporters in Rome. Scaglia should be recognized as “absolutely uninvolved with any wrongdoing, if it existed,” Corso said.

I always presume innocence, unless the facts clearly attest otherwise, but expect the Internet to have a field day with this one. The Italian blogosphere, possibly fueled by rivals, disgruntled former employees, and unsatisfied customers of FastWeb, will assume guilt as they always do–innocence doesn’t get as many hits. A bit of international reputation management could help him immensely right about now.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-02/fastweb-s-conduct-absolutely-correct-scaglia-says-update1-.html