People are talking about you and your company online. They might be discussing your products, reviewing your business, or sharing their experience with your brand(s). Regardless of what they are saying, you should be involved in the conversation - or at the very least, you should be monitoring it.
Online reputation management is one of the hottest areas in online marketing right now, and for good reason. Your reputation is like your credit - you can’t wait until you get a negative review or some bad press to check on it, you need to be proactive by monitoring the web for mentions of your company name, by claiming your brand on all the relevant social networks and social media sites, and by participating in any conversations that mention your business.

One of the ways you can be proactive is by monitoring the web for mentions of your brand, through Google Alerts or ideally a paid tracking tool (Google Alerts is decent but definitely doesn’t pick up everything, the paid tools are more complicated but much more thorough). Then, when you find blog posts or social media mentions of your company, you can respond if necessary and nip potential problems in the bud- and at the very least you will know what people are saying about you!

Of course, once you find out where people are talking about your business, you may to join the discussion. By responding (in a reasonable, logical manner of course) you can share your side of the story, as well as add a human face to your company. A carefully planned reaction to any online attacks - damage control 2.0, if you will - can prevent small issues from becoming major crises that spread all over the internet.

However, sometimes business owners neglect reputation management until it is too late - they’ve already got some negative press, bad reviews, or even RipOffReports filed against them. That is when reactive reputation management - flooding the web with positive articles and blog posts, creating branded social media profiles and keeping them active, and other online marketing techniques come in handy. Learning to be proactive when it comes to your reputation can be a costly and time-consuming process; however, working with a SEO agency that has online reputation management expertise can prove well worth the expense - after all, it is an investment in your company’s future.