For some time there have been rumors around Silicon Valley and beyond about the magic that is the Google campus. It has been spoken of like some sort of Geek Nirvana or Coding Valhalla where you feast nightly in the Google cafeteria on any meal your heart desires as you guzzle Mountain Dew and debate Ruby on Rails with the ghost of Einstein. Some of this talk has turned out to be true. For instance, Google allows their engineers to take time in “nap pods” for a quick break during the day. It is without any surprise that I can see how they got their good reputation.

Which brings us to an important but often overlooked concept of reputation management. With the relatively new phenomena of social networks and blogging, a company’s brand name can be elevated to otherworldly heights with just a few keystrokes and clicks. Wikipedia defines reputation management as:

the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop. All entities involved are generally people, but that need not always be the case. Other examples of entities include animals, businesses, or even locations or materials. The tracking and reporting may range from word-of-mouth to statistical analysis of thousands of data points.

An important part of this process is understanding that social networks give consumers easy access to spreading news, and thus reputation management online is critical. A good place to start efforts in this vein is brand monitoring. You can track a company, brand, person, just about anything online.

Google itself has positioned itself in this space with its Google Alerts, automatic notifications that ping you when your search term is found online. ReputationDefender also offers personal brand monitoring with MyReputation. MyReputation from ReputationDefender goes beyond Google Alerts to search social networks, white papers, people search engines and the deep internet to return more information related to your person.

Monitoring a brand, whether corporate or personal, is a vital part of Online Reputation Management and, as the tale of the Googleplex shows, having a great online reputation reflects well on your brand and your business.

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