If others are talking about your brand online, you better hope they are saying nice things. Are you listening to what they are saying?

Your online presence on social media plays a critical role in how others perceive you and your business. If people are happy with and like you, others will know. In the same vein, If they are not, others will know this too.

If you are not proactively building and managing your online reputation, you better get started. People love to share negative opinions and what they say travels like the speed of light.

Businesses that do not catch and react promptly to what unhappy customers are saying about them, risk loss of business.

You must monitor what others are saying about your products or services. Below are some actionable tips on how to manage and track your online reputation.

Monitor Your Buzz

Using either Google Alerts or a professional service to monitor your name and business name.

Also set up alerts to various keywords and variations on each. This way you can catch both the good and bad said about you.

Promote the good, and respond to, if needed, the bad.

Think Twice

Before you post something, whether a picture, a quote, a comment, or an entire blog post think twice about it if it is controversial.

Stories abound of people who made an innocent comment on Twitter then became the top trending topic overnight, and not in a good way.

If you would not say it or share it openly, perhaps you might not want to say it or share it, at all.

Use Privacy Settings

Most social media networks have privacy settings that you can use to control some aspects of what gets out to the world.

But it is essential to know that if you say it, share it, or comment on it anyplace on the net, someone will see it.

This includes discussion boards, social media, and blog post. You are never anonymous on the Internet.

Build your Brand

Keep building your brand through blog posts, articles, press releases, and comments, that matches the image you are trying to project for your business.

The more positive content you have out there on the web, the more likely anything negative will be buried.

Monitor Photo Tags

Be aware that on Facebook, other people can tag you in photos without your permission if you do not set up your privacy settings correctly.

This can be especially problematic when a well-meaning friend uses the tagging function to get you to look at the picture. It might be completely off-brand and even in bad taste.

It might just be a simple picture of you off work drinking the super bowl of margaritas on Cinco de Mayo that causes the issue.

While in some cases, you may not care who sees the picture. In other situations, you may not want it public. What you want people to see depends on what image you are trying to promote.

Be Active

It is so easy to automate a lot of social media today, that we could technically ignore social media for weeks without anyone being the wiser about our absence.

We are sharing blog posts, Tweets, and news articles automatically, but are we active enough in our online presence to share other people’s good news?

Ask for Reviews

Not only should you ask clients and customers for reviews, but you should also promote those good reviews on all channels.

By promoting the good reviews that you get, you will put a lot of good news into the search results for anyone searching for you.

Mind Your SEO

Search Engine Optimization is more important than ever. As the old ways of getting search engine attention go by the wayside, new methods come to the forefront.

Ensure that you keep abreast of changes so that you can keep your search engine optimization working for you.

Google Yourself

First, remove the personalization from the search to get the right results. Learn how to phrase your searches properly so that you can find out what people really see when they search for you, your business, products or services.

The Top Online Reputation Don’ts

Republished from 10/4/2012 with updated content and video.