In the past, negative news usually made its way through the news cycle and then faded from public consciousness. Today, bad news can stick around for a long time, popping up every time a potential customer, client or partner does a Web search, closing the door on opportunities and potentially threatening the future of your organization.

Also, with the growth in popularity of blogs, forums and customer review sites, it’s a lot easier for a few unhappy customers or disgruntled employees to wage a smear campaign against your business, blackening your brand with lies, misinformation and slander.

In today’s world, maintaining a vigilant watch on your online reputation can make the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. Protecting your online reputation starts with being aware of it. The easiest way you can keep up with what’s being posted about you is to do a Google search of your company name online.

Once every couple of weeks (or when a less-than-fortunate event occurs) you’ll probably want to run your company name through Google to see what comes up. Chances are that there won’t be much, but sometimes you may be surprised at what comes up, whether it’s news stories, blog postings, comments to news sites or items on your employees’ social networking pages.

Your online reputation is an increasingly important part of your brand. According to a recent Harris Interactive poll, nearly two-thirds of all retail consumers do research online before making purchases. As 75 percent of these consumers say the Web search improves their buying experience, this trend isn’t going away.

By carefully monitoring the Web, you can make sure that customers’ first online impression of your company is a good impression, and take steps to suppress negative stories or blog posts about your business.

Listening to what’s being said about your business online can also help you recognize problems that need to be resolved that you otherwise may have missed. By monitoring blogs and customer review sites on Google, you can find out if your customers, partners and suppliers are happy, if your employers are doing their job, or if your competition is getting ahead of you.

By taking steps to monitor and protect your online reputation can help shield your company from brand-busting negative information, correct potential problems and protect the hard-earned reputation you and your employees have worked so long to build.

Currently, the business environment is dynamically news-driven wherein establishing and maintaining a firm corporate reputation is critically imperative to achieve the success of large corporations and market leaders that dominate Wall Street such as Intel who have established strong corporate identities that define what their companies stand for.

Corporate reputation management is the routing of focus and performance of an organization from the viewpoint of an attribute that can be considered as one of its most important aspects: reputation. CEOs and senior management acknowledges the importance of reputation management in terms of making or breaking a company’s bottom line.

The company’s reputation can either attract or dissuade business and investment partners, increase or damage sales, recruit or discourage employees, persuade lawmakers and legislators, and simply touch all audiences. Nowadays, there is an ever increasing focus on the business of corporate reputation management. A firm and solid corporate reputation establishes confidence in the future of the company and can boost the success of the business by pushing profitable sales in busy markets, attracting and retaining capable employees, dissuade competition, appeal to capital investors and business partners and a number of other advantages.

Corporate reputation management is accomplished utilizing a range of highly developed systems and techniques which include reputation scorecards, KPIs or key performance indicators, competitive benchmarks, media content analysis, journalism surveys, research on PR, evaluation of stakeholders, measurement of internal communications, opinion polls, research on crisis and new media measurement.

These tools and techniques can be designed to buttress corporate reputation management, which may involve studies on thought leadership, surveys and analysis on the company reputation, measurements and rating methods in PR and communications, surveys on corporate image and stakeholder researches. Hence, a whole range of techniques are employed to boost and protect the reputation of an organization from negative publicity from all kinds of media, and to maintain the company’s name in the perception of the public.

A comprehensive reputation management for corporations is considered high quality if and when it includes proactive, reactive and continuous measures that guarantee the protection and improvement of your company’s reputation. Keeping up with the dynamic pace of the business means that the company has to constantly promote its reputation by conducting PR campaigns to initiate the introduction of new products to your audience and prospective clients. Also, the company can reach out to its existing customers by responding to their mails, emails or complaints. If problems have already arisen and there is a need for a resolution to control the damage for the company, then reactive reputation management is the best option to create a plan to resolve the issues.

It is important to note that corporate reputation management is only effective when there is continuous implementation of professionally designed measures with the aim of enhancing the company’s current and standing reputation. The key to this is to have a strong and reliable communication plan that should be implemented consistently across the company. Choosing a professional and well established provider to do these measures for your company will be advantageous in ensuring the good reputation of your organization.