Worried about online reputation management?

Everything you do or say these days has the potential to end up on the internet. When someone coined the phrase “big brother is watching”, they weren’t kidding…big brother is here.

The key thing to know is it’s possible to take some control of the way we are perceived on the internet, at least to some extent, through online reputation management. Online reputation management involves keeping track of what is said or seen about a person, brand or company on the web, encouraging the preponderance of visible, positive information, and suppressing any negative information.

Considering all the places on the web where your name can appear, online reputation management can be quite the challenge. The good news is there are many tools available that can help you easily monitor and manage your own online reputation.

Here are 10 top online reputation management tools you should know:

1. Google – Me On the Web. Me On the Web is a free tool provided by Google that helps you set up alerts for monitoring mentions of your name or other information you provide. You can create alerts that are based on your name, your business name or even industry related words/phrases.  The alerts are delivered to your inbox depending on the frequency you choose.
2. Knowem.com. This service searches social networks, domain names and trademarks for your name/brand. You can set up your own profiles with your chosen name or you can pay to have them set up profiles for you in all these places.
3. Social Mention. Social Mention is very similar to Google Alerts, but it searches social media for mentions of your name instead of Google search results.
4. Naymz. This is a free service initially, but the majority of benefits are through the paid service online.  Naymz gives you a dashboard for monitoring and analyzing your online reputation over a wide variety of accounts.
5. Klout. There are some that love Klout and others that hate it.  Either way, this service has become widely known for creating an “influence score” based on how you interact with various social media.  The three main social sites right now Klout covers are Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Whether the source system is flawed or not, Klout is used in some arenas as a measure of credibility online. I personally have been connected to little known business opportunities because of the influence score.
6. Reputation.com. This is a full suite of reputation management services, mostly fee-based.  You will find on the site there are tools both for individuals on a personal level, as well as business services.  If you listen to news or talk radio at all you probably have heard their commercials.  Especially if you are a small business, this tool is worth a look.
7. Disqus. Disqus was designed to help you manage and display your comments across multiple networks, such as both blog and forum comments.  Although it’s more of a comment monitor, it allows you to centralize what people are commenting on in relation to your connected sites.
8. Atomkeep. Though it is currently in beta mode, Atomkeep gives you the ability to sync your profile across many networks. Every time you make a change in one profile, you can update all your other ones with the same information, saving time with one less step to implement.
9. Twitter search. The search function on Twitter lets you save searches for specific terms, giving you the ability to monitor the results of these searches.  If you use certain consistent hashtags (#) for your business posts, you can also track here how often the tag is being used in relation to your brand.
10. RSS feeds for searches. Many sites give you the ability to create an RSS feed for a specific search, so you can monitor it from your feed reader. These include feeds for Yahoo alerts, Technorati searches, and Yahoo Answers searches.

With the wealth helpful tools available for online reputation management, you can easily get stuck deciding which ones to use. I suggest that you try picking 2-3 that seem easiest for you, that cover the networks you need to frequent, and that don’t overlap with each other. Most importantly, be sure you implement tools that help you keep up with your reputation without too much effort.

Know of another tool that helps with online reputation management? Leave us a comment with a link we should check out.

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• Online Reputation Management – Important for Non-Internet Businesses Too!
• Are You Properly Managing Online Reputation?

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