The manner in which consumers research products or businesses to spend their money on has been changed by user generated contents. Available for us to read are opinions and reviews by people who have already bought the products. Through this, consumers will be assisted in making informed choices that were impossible in the past.

The internet is a democracy where one of its main advocacies is freedom of speech. Everybody can be heard so long as they have a computer and an internet access. Now more than ever, a larger percentage of people are actively using social networking communities and sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Trip advisor as well as consumer forums.

Reputations are being destroyed by articles that are not favourable, blogs, angry employees, websites and others. It can even be made unintentionally by one of the workers who have mistakenly revealed information that is sensitive and were never meant for the public domain.

However, some reputation damage is actually created by your competitor by bad mouthing your name. This can have a big effect because a lot of times, this opinion and comments will have really high rankings in the search engines. There was even a report that says if a particular person doing a search sees a negative result below the official website, there’s a 70% change that they will click on the negative result.

The facelessness of being in the internet resulted to people being more forthright in their opinions today as compared to the past when newspapers and other media were held responsible for what their journalist wrote with lawsuit threats if the things that were written were not based on a fact.

Reputation management is alerting and tracking of contents that are freshly generated and then manage anything that is inappropriate. It is a good idea to know what other people are saying about you or your product as well as how it is being received. Reputation management is advantageous to businesses, charities, individuals, celebrities and organizations.

If you want to defend your online brand and image as it is important to you, you should look for a reputation management expert who has the experience in all the areas of concern as well as provide you information on your current reputation online. It is also a good idea to employ the reputation management experts who can give you an effective and well rounded plan.

Being able to do this, you and your business will be protected against those who are out there to ruin what you have worked on for a long time now; having a good reputation.