Reputation management involves tracking an entity's actions as well finding the view that other entities' hold about that action. This is like a feedback loop, a reaction and reply to reputation damaging information.

Entities

Entities refer to people, animals, businesses, locations, and even materials. Word-of-mouth and statistical analysis of many data points helps in the tracking and reporting of action. Entities which also include products and services can be affected by poor postings, negative feedback, bad testimonials, false scam accusations, and product reviews by fake users. This may be the work of disgruntled customers, jealous competitors, or sacked ex-employees.

On The Web

Though, reputation management has been around for years, it has gained momentum only with recent advent of social media. For instance, a customer went to watch a movie and really hated it. The next day, he talked to his friends on how he wasted his time and money on the movie. Hearing him, his friends and their friends might take his opinion seriously and not go to watch that movie. This was how an opinion spread in earlier times. But, now, with globalization, we live in a world where information is disseminated very fast with the help of computers.

Widespread computing has seen a vast growth of reputation management online. There are many firms that report reputation using predefined criteria. The main purpose of these sources is to help people build good public relations. However, the threat of criticism on the social media always looms large. But, the criticism can generate benefits if it is reversed. Professional journalism and user-created content include material that is scrutinized online.

The greater the number of internet users and the more the content generated by them, the greater the desire to change the results. For instance, an online auction and shopping website used a feedback from consumer generated content. This helped the buyers and sellers to gain reputation which in turn helped other buyers and sellers to make informed decisions.

Reputation risk management becomes essential when companies get bad publicity. If publicity can be positive it can be utterly negative for a company's reputation. In fact, sometimes it can be so strong that it can put a company out of business. Even a single link which speaks ill of a company's products and services can be risky. For instance, a customer is searching for a particular service using specific keywords. If negative or false reviews appear in the first few search results, they can really get a bad impression of the company.

Using reputation management software cannot remove the reputation damaging search results but it can always push the search result to a position where a user would never browse. It is like making the image-tarnishing result invisible. Both companies whose reputation has been harmed and who are wary of future attacks can use this service.

Reputation management is a long-term campaign which seeks to root out bad elements that can spoil a business's image.