Online Reputation Management is a topic of growing concern for businesses of all sizes. One of the good things is that you can automate some of this process. The bare minimum that a company should be doing is setting up Google Alerts, and maybe setting up services like TagBulb & BlogPulse. 

But what can you do after that? So we sourced the advice to two Titans. 

Ann Smarty & Barry Schwartz

Ann Smarty is:

The founder of SeoSmarty and MyBlogGuest and is an Editor and Blogger at Search Engine Journal

Ann says that:

The first thing that a business should do is to embrace and understand Social Media Search.

Filter out Clutter and Find Real Brand-Related Discussions:
 

• Filter out links in Twitter search with [-filter:links] operator
• Play with emotional coloring (using the smile emoticons) as well as search for tweeted questions
• Use | operator in Facebook to find more relevant conversations

Ann expands on the topic on a post that she wrote on Mashable, Advanced Social Media Search.
 
Ann also shares a few more advanced tips on using various tools to monitor your brand online:
 

• 7 Awesome Ideas to use Gmail Filters for SEO Tasks (see tip 2)
• 5 Free tools for monitoring brand mentions on Facebook
• Steal This Idea: Display Your Brand Name Mentions in your Blog Sidebar

You can follow Ann Smarty on:

SEOSmarty and be sure to follow her on Twitter @SEOSmarty

Barry Schwartz is:

CEO at RustyBrick, Executive Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and News Editor at Search Engine Land

Barry says that:

“Google Alerts are the bare minimum a brand (company, product, personal name) should be using to track what blogs, writers and their customers are saying about them. Google Alerts works very well, I personally like the RSS subscription option, but they all work well.

Aside from your own rep management, track your partners, to see where they stand financially or competitively. I once wrote about tracking my bank, during the time of the banks were having issues because of mortgages. I rather be early to read if a partner is having issues or their CEO gets booted than finding out from that partner directly.”

You can follow Barry on RustyBrick and on Twitter at @RustyBrick

It’s all very clear

If you are not monitoring your reputation online… then you need to do so. As I said earlier, most of this will be automated for you. It just takes a moment to set things up. Feel free to share your thoughts and comments with us on this topic of Online Reputation Management.