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The financial crisis and its reverberations in the real economy has given cause for company’s to examine their reputation. This, along with the explosion in Internet usage will make the digital medium one of the most critical channels to monitor for reputation. This notion is supported by a survey conduced in March 2009 by McKinsey Quarterly. Where the survey showed a majority of senior executives around the world  said that public trust in business and commitment to free markets had deteriorated.

Further, there are more opportunities than ever before to become a victim of negative or slanderous online information. It is very easy for someone to easily post a comment, make a video, create a blog post, file a complaint, promote your competition, develop a hate site and more. Or even worse, an angry employee will leave the company with revenge on their mind and reek havoc with to yours. Managing your online reputation is now critical. In a previous post, I discussed the concepts behind Online Reputation Management (ORM).

More companies need to be aware of their Online Reputation given the rapid increase in usage of user and consumer generated media, such as customer reviews, blogs, and social media websites. These types of websites can help influence decisions in purchases or can be used to falsely destroy a company’s reputation. That is where online reputation management comes in. Online reputation management is more than monitoring and keeping a pulse on the internet and the consumer but this is a critical first step. It is huge challenge to monitor the information on the Internet although there are various alerts that can be set up in Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Baidu) or Blogs (Technorati, BackType) etc. In China, the most sophisticated ORM platform is SinoBuzz. This real-time ORM platform can monitor and manage Chinese and English digital channels as well so provide information in reach, authority, influence etc…

Unfortunately, perceptions are not always based on fact, but on opinion, conjecture and rumors. In the words of Warren Buffet, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

While crisis come and go, reputations last forever.  Measuring the effects of a online reputation management program can be tricky, but in the end how much is your business reputation worth.