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With more people getting all of their information online, it can be very hard to control your reputation. Information online gets passed from person to person quicker with the birth of social media marketing, plus people can put any information online whether it is true or not. It means that not only do you have to shake hands and kiss babies to maintain a positive reputation, but you also have to be very active and aware online. Here are five tips to help with online reputation management so that it matches your offline one.

Everything is Public

Even if you try to keep personal accounts and public accounts separate, it is still impossible to ensure that everything you want to be private stays that way. Forbes recommends that you do not put anything online unless you wouldn’t care if the whole world saw it. This way, even if something does get out from your personal account, it won’t cause any damage to your reputation.

Combat Negative Reviews

One of the biggest things that will impact your online reputation is the reviews that you get online. Unfortunately, people who are upset are more likely to leave reviews. The first step to combating negative reviews is knowing when they are posted. With the help of companies like Reputation.com, you can get alerts whenever a negative review is posted on a variety of sites, including Yelp and Google. That way, you can go in and address the review, leaving a comment to demonstrate that you care about their concerns.

Another way to counteract negative reviews is to get more positive ones. You can do this by asking your in-person customers if they would be willing to leave you an honest review online. Before long, Reputation.com will be able to track the results of your efforts by showing more positive reviews.

Spread the Wealth

There are bound to be some things posted about you online that you would rather not be there. While you cannot do anything to get rid of them, you can counteract them by spreading positive things about you all over the web. CIO points out that if you do this, when your name is searched, the positive items will show up over the negative ones. Have a strong presence through every facet of social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Google+. Every keyword counts.

Be Active Online

Having a presence in social media is not enough. It is a great way to build up your search rankings, but you also need to respond to customers comments and concerns that are made via social media platforms. According to ReachCast, 60 percent of people who leave comments on social media pages expect a response. If you are not leaving responses, you are upsetting a large portion of your customer base. When you do comment, you need to acknowledge the concerns or express gratitude for the comments. Never argue.

Everything is Permanent

However you interact online, remember that everything you do is permanent. Even if the people involved will forget the instance in the near future, it is always searchable, and therefore, it can always impact your online reputation.

While your in-person actions can only be seen by those around you and can be forgotten over time, your online reputation lasts forever. It is vital that you take the time to ensure that you have an online reputation management procedure.

Reputation management is a process whereby an individual person or group, such as a business, is assigned a ‘ranking’ based on how that individual or group interacts within a larger structure. Reputation management usually takes the form of professional software or a specially developed application. While there are free versions of this technology, in practical market terms, reputation management is usually handled by what is known as “innovation management software.”

Paid Services

Innovation management software allows large global corporations with literally hundreds of thousands of employees to gather ideas from their workforce, and correspondingly assign reputation rankings to each individual employee. The employees can earn their reputations based on how their comments are rated by both their peers and their superiors. In this instance, reputation management is a constantly evolving process, with the software recalibrating the ranking based on new, incoming data.

There are several software major innovation management software companies that provide this service, including Brightidea and Spigit. Within each company’s software suites there are customized reputation management modules. In Brightidea’s case, each employee’s reputation is based on an in-depth point scheme. Employees earn these points by participating in voting and collaboration sessions, where ideas are both critiqued and improved upon by the larger user community. Employees who perform exceptionally well by consistently voting for ‘good’ ideas, or earn a significant number of points by always being helpful in collaborative efforts, earn points. The more points they earn, the higher their reputation ranking, which draws attention within the framework of the reputation management module. These individuals are singled out for either recognition or reward by senior management. Spigit’s process is similar, although it emphasizes an slightly more opaque approach, providing management with more discretion as to how individuals may earn higher status within the reputation management system.

Reputation management can also be bought as a separate service to enhance the online reputation of a company. An example is British Petroleum, which after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico aggressively worked to make sure that positive articles about the company and its efforts to clean up the spill would appear when a user typed in keywords relating to the spill into global search engines. While this service was folded into a larger public relations campaign, the technology that powered the service is a perfect example of reputation management.

Free Services

Large online businesses provide a ‘free’ version of reputation management. ‘Free’ is in quotes in this context because the service often requires the user to pay a fee to use the service itself; the reputation management aspect of that service does not cost anything. An example is eBay, where users can rank other users based on their responsiveness and general conduct during a transaction.

Benefits and Drawbacks

Reputation rankings play a huge role in the amount of power any one person or group has in influencing a process. Prior to the advent of this technology, a person’s presence online or within a computerized software suite had an importance ratio of 1:1; in other words, that person’s commentary had the same weight as any other user. The corresponding clutter of ideas, both good and bad, led to the need for a hierarchy and a cleaner organizational format.

The increasing popularity of reputation management software has both benefits and drawbacks. Reputation management can help identify leaders and thoughtful individuals who have a worthwhile contribution to make out of a sea of literally billions of opinions. Unfortunately, reputation management can also create artificial barriers to innovation and an inaccurate reflection of reality. On the positive side, singling out exceptionally savvy individuals helps advance both the career of that individual and the prosperity of the organization or community in which they are participating. However, on the negative side, reputation rankings can shut out slightly more unusual ideas that may lead to improved processes, especially if those ideas originate from an individual with a low or nominal reputation score.

As with any business, those who control reputation management must be vigilant, and open to frequently changing or updating how reputations are tallied. Individuals who attempt to “game” the system by illegitimately inflating their ratings must be screened out; likewise, those who are hesitant to participate must be encouraged to contribute.

By Peter Marino

Peter Marino is the Senior Partner and CMO of reelWebDesign.com a search and social media marketing company in NYC.