You could be forgiven for thinking that they were just another excuse for an internet driven acronym or two, but Online Reputation Management (ORM) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are far more widespread than that. You may have heard the acronym SEO – which stands for Search Engine Optimisation? ORM and SMM are the new generation of optimisation. In the past, everything was done on your site in order to bump up your search engine rankings – you may have heard of keywords and keyphrases, meta information and ‘content being king’. In the world of Web 2.0, on-site SEO is only one small part of your success. Now, you need to concentrate as much on off-site exposure if you want to succeed in business.

Since the blogging and social media boom, information – or misinformation – can almost instantly reach anyone who is connected to the Internet. Journalists’, Investors’, job-seekers’ opinions about your company can shift within a few days, if not hours.
Internet is dreaded for the immediacy with which information can be conveyed. Therefore, many companies fear for their reputation: words spread fast on the web. There is not much you can do to prevent them reaching their audience. A comment posted on a high-ranking blog can make or break a company's reputation.

Several years ago now, a new form of professional was born. He was the search engine optimisation professional, and as he grew in a cut-throat business environment, constantly fighting with competition of varying quality, he adopted either a white hat or a black hat. The black hatted people sought out ways to make the biggest impact and the quickest buck by cheating the system and finding every underhand way possible around Google’s algorithms. His pale hatted compatriots beavered away, doing things above board and correctly, and cheering every time Google caught on to one of the underhand techniques and penalised the cheating sites.

Take a minute and do a Google search for your company name, your domain name, and your personal name. What do those results on the first page or two in Google look like? Hopefully everything on the first few pages of search results is positive.

The last time Ratan K K, a senior em­ployee at Pinstrom Ventures received a bio-data from someone applyingfor a job, he did not call up the candidate's 'refer­ences'. Instead, he simply typed the per­son's name on the Google bar and hit the search button.

Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to post that video from your bachelor party in Vegas. Or to include a recipe for pot brownies in your otherwise above-board food blog. Or to rant about your former employer -- specifically, about the CEO’s bad haircut and body odor -- on an industry message board.

After watching so many brands, from mom and pop to blue chip, getting lambasted on the web recently I have noticed that the majority of them have been unable to handle it effectively. While effective online reputation management may be a relatively new concept to some brands that’s still no excuse. These 10 rules to recovery should provide a practical approach for brands facing an online threat.