Have you ever been hanging out, randomly searching online and found something negative about yourself in a search engine results page?

OK, well, maybe you weren’t randomly searching exactly, but I bet when you saw that negative stuff, you wished you had known about it when it first was indexed, so you could have defended your brand, yourself, or your service. Called reputation management, monitoring your site and service throughout the blogosphere has become an increasingly popular service. For any startup, small, medium or large sized brands/companies, it’s best to have someone dedicated to monitoring your reputation online while involving yourself in conversational marketing.

The most important aspect of reputation management is knowing how to handle each situation. This is usually a combined effort on the part of the reputation management service and the corporation that hires them. Remember, bad press can be GREAT press; however, it’s important to look at all the angles to determine what needs to be refuted, what needs to be extinguished, and what fires need to be flamed. The job of a reputation management service is to monitor pages, track mentions of key phrases, propose combatant techniques, and help back a brand with an army of reputable community members.  Read more