It all starts with your name, and your company name. So the question for today is, what are you doing to protect them?

Most of you are going to answer that you are doing solid, ethical business and keeping everything on the up and up. Which is what most companies actually think. If you don’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. But that’s not necessarily true. We get calls from new clients almost daily that thought the same thing. But they were wrong. Because it’s not just ticked off clients that write bad stuff about you online my friends. It can come from places you least expect.

Ex employees trying to snag some of your business and branch out on their own… Maybe an ex-wife that is holding a grudge…. How about an old high school rival that you haven’t thought about in years???

Anyone of these people, plus dozens more could possibly cut into your sales and bottom line. What is worse is that it’s not hard for them to do. Understand, they can post a review on Ripoff Report in just a few minutes. They can write a nasty comment on Complaints Board in an equally short amount of time. But those reviews are powerful and can rise to the top of the search engine result pages quickly. Also damaging your reputation swiftly and easily. Often, the person it effects is totally unaware that they even exist.

So what should you be doing to protect your good name, besides maintaining good business practices? It’s simple, you need to be monitoring what people are saying about you online. You can’t fight the problem if you don’t know what the problem is.

So at the very least you need to have Google Alerts setup for your name, your company name, and other related terms. I often suggest that our clients setup alerts for all of their employee names as well, just to track any possible conflicts outside of the office that may be something you need to be aware of. Google Alerts are low end protection and not what we suggest for real protection, but they are better than nothing.

If you want a more solid reputation monitoring plan you need to give us a call. We have several different reputation monitoring packages, one to suit every business. We monitor Twitter, Facebook, and thousands of blogs and social networks. We can alert you to just about any negative content that comes online, often seconds after it has been posted. With our reputation monitoring you can rest at night.