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.
You might remember situations as “Dell Hell” (unfavourable post from a dissatisfied customer on his personal blog). Or more recently, the online comments to an interview with Dutch KPN CEO Ad Scheepbouwer. KPN Employees were eager to criticize their boss.

Your concern is to “determine if opinions expressed online are favourable to you and positive and help
and will aid marketing efforts or are negative and may damage both reputation and sales” says Richard Morochove from PC World.

Here are some basic tools and tips to begin with.

1. Create Google Alerts: Monitoring your online reputation should begin with tracking negative comments or buzz about yourself, your company or your employees circulating on the web. Suppose that you work for Société Générale. You know that rumours begin to circulate about your company and you want to evaluate the situation yourself.

2. Engage in Social Networks: being a part of the social media is the best way to navigate into specific or popular networks. This way you can learn what people are saying before it reaches the whole internet community or spills over to other media channels. The goal is to counter any erroneous or negative information. In the case of inaccurate information, react and answer in an appropriate manner in order to re-establish the truth or moderate radical comments. Additionally, having profiles on social media sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, gives you the opportunity to position your company the way you want.

3. Use SEO: appropriate Search Engine Optimisation activities can aim for the promotion of chosen content and news in order to make that more visible, while making the negative content less so. The majority of search engine users only consider the first search results and often don’t even look at the bottom of the page.

4. Use Online Reputation Specialists: in addition to the points above, and especially if you don’t have the time for those recommendations, you can use specialists in Consumer-Generated Media measurement