With the arrival of online tools that make it easy to share information, meet new people and keep in touch more rapidly than ever; online reputation has taken on a dual facet. Individuals and businesses no longer have to be troubled about their reputation in true life but in the virtual planet as well, making it two times as hard to keep up with what’s being said. There are a few ways that you can work to manage your online reputation. The resources listed below offer tips and tools to make it easier to track, control and manage your online reputation so you stay on top and in control of your personal and professional image.

Reputation Management Tips

Here are some general tips when managing your online reputation.

1. Create official online profiles. Don’t let just anyone talk about you online. Create your own profiles and websites complete with the type of information you really want to be available online about you.

2. Check what people are saying about you online. Whether good or bad you can do yourself a kindness by finding out what is being said about you online. Use some of the tools mentioned further down in this article to stay in the loop.

3. Stay on the ball. Don’t get sluggish about monitoring your reputation. If necessary, perform weekly checks to see if there’s any information about you that could possible be harmful.

4. Google yourself. The easiest method to find out where you or your company’s online reputation stands is to Google (search) yourself. See what kind of results pop up first. If they aren’t what they’d like them to be, you’ve got some work to do.

5. Presume everything can get on the web. Equally in your personal and professional life, what you say online and off can come back to bite you. Be safe and assume any emails, conversations or photos out there can eventually end up on the Web.

6. Select your words carefully. If you are blogging, running a website or just have a social media profile, be cautious what you post. Unless you’re looking for controversy what you say may cause you tribulations in the future.

7. Know your weakness. If you know your business has a particular weakness or are just familiar with your tendency for getting untamed on the weekend, keep this in mind and have it as your top priority for checking on your online reputation.

8. Protect yourself from hackers. This may look as if like it goes with no saying, but many people fall short to adequately securing their online information. Make sure yours is as safe and sound as it possibly can be.

9. Keep social networks private. One way to prevent snooping eyes is to keep your social networking profiles confidential to all except those you approve. This will keep informal viewers from seeing your information, good or bad.

10. Consider pseudonyms. If you do want to keep a blog or take on arguments on internet message boards, create a name for yourself to hide behind so you can’t be easily tracked.

11. Be proactive. Instead of waiting until you have a problem with your online reputation, stay ahead of the game. Search for what’s being said about you regularly so you’ll stay up-to-date.

12. Act quickly. If you do find something said or posted about you online that you feel could be particularly damaging to you, take action immediately. Whether it’s your friend posting photos from your bachelor nigh out or someone you don’t know slandering your business, taking care of it more rapidly rather than later is best.

13. Keep your cool. You may be irritated at what someone has said about you online, but don’t let it illustrate. Keep your fury to yourself and off the internet where it can do more damage than good.

Articles

Here are some good quality articles about reputation management that are nice reads….

1. Protect Your Online Reputation: This article from SEO Chat lays out some basics for monitoring and protecting your online reputation.

2. Ten Tactics That Could Save Your Online Reputation: The CEO of Trakur gives some great advice in this Mashable article on how your company can avoid reputation meltdown.

3. How to Manage Your Online Reputation: This article goes through a number of tools and how to use them to keep your reputation intact.

4. Social Networks Become Powerful Tool in Online Reputation Management: Find out how social networks are playing a bigger role than ever in online reputation from this short article.

5. How to Create Online Reputation Tools for Your Brand: Worried about the online component of your company’s brand? This article gives some advice on creating custom tools to monitor and control your online rep.

6. Online Reputation Handbook: You’ll find just about everything you ever wanted to know about online reputation in this helpful handbook.

7. Manage Your Online Reputation: Lifehacker gives some great tips and pointers, as well as links to tools that can help you get control of your reputation.

8. Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide: If you’ve never done much with online reputation before, or haven’t even considered it, check out this business-geared article.

9. How To Protect, Fix Your Online Reputation: From keeping problems from arising to fixing them when they do, this article is full of helpful advice.

10. Using Social Media to Manage Online Reputation: Find out how social media can be a help, not just a hindrance, to online reputation.

11. Basics of Online Reputation Management: Here you’ll learn the basics of getting your online reputation in order.

12. Managing Your Reputation Online: Technology Review provides this informative article that can help you understand and take action when it comes to your virtual reputation.

13. Online Reputation Management for Individuals: Online reputation isn’t just a concern for businesses, and this article explains how individuals can keep their name in good standing as well.

Websites and Blogs

These sites are dedicated to helping you keep an eye on and manage online reputation, providing the basics, suggestions for security, and much more.

1. Online Reputation: This site has articles on everything from brand reputation management to monitoring your reputation online.

2. The Reputation Blog: Business owners and leaders can take advantage of the advice offered by this blog.

3. Reputation Advisor: Here you’ll find advice and articles that provide essential information on keeping your business’ rep and your own looking good.

4. Reputation Management: From information on slander protection to posts about using search engines to monitor your reputation this blog is full of great info and insight.

5. CopyBrighter: Get some new insights into online reputation management and social media from this blog.

6. StepRepBlog: Find out just what social reputation is or get tips on connecting positively with customers from this site.

7. OnlineReputation.com: This site provides more in-depth explanations on how to use reputation tracking software, advice on building a solid online rep, and much more.

Personal Identity

These tools can help you manage your numerous online profiles, monitor your personal reputation and more.

1. ClaimID: Check out this program that uses OpenID to manage your personal identity over several sites, meaning you only have to remember the password for one, not numerous ones.

2. FindMeOn: Want to connect your identity over several sites? FindMeOn lets you do that while keeping your information private and secure.

3. FreeYourID: Make maintaining your online identity easy, with this tool that bases it directly on your name.

4. Garlik: If you’re worried that your identity may be more than marred and straight out stolen, give this tool a try. You’ll be able to search for mentions of you on the web that might involve identity theft.

5. myOpenID: Don’t worry about having multiple logins with this OpenID site.

6. SpyShakers: Try this tool to get access to any of your profile passwords remotely. It specializes in protecting your information from spyware.

7. TypeKey: TypeKey allows you to integrate your blog into your OpenID, allowing you to manage pretty much everything with one main profile.

8. Realmee: Here you can create a personal profile that will allow you to more easily control what others can see of you online.

9. LookUpPage: Want to control what people find when they search for you? This site helps out, by giving you a central page that comes up at the top when your name is searched for.

10. MonitorThis: Try out this site to monitor and track keywords over multiple search engines, giving you clues about who’s talking about you.

Professional Identity

Keep your business’ name out of the mud by protecting it with these helpful tools.

1. Trust-Index: Find out how well your business is trusted with this tool.

2. Google Alerts: With Google Alerts you can get email updates of the latest google results based on your name or other topic of your choosing.

3. BoardTracker: Whether you post on boards yourself or want to see if anyone else is talking about you, this tool makes it easy to filter to threads.

4. Vanno: Get an online reputation the democratic way, with this site that allows others to vote on the stories, videos and blogs about your company.

5. Serph: Use this search tool to look up your company and find out just what kind of buzz is going around the web about your company.

6. Searchles: This social search engine can help you keep up with the news out about your business.

7. Omgili: Search through the numerous forums out there to find out what people are saying about you using this helpful tool.

8. BoardReader: This tool is especially useful, allowing users to search through forums, videos, Twitter conversations, IMDB and more.

9. Joongel: Zoom in on the type of media you’d like to search with this online tool. Choose from videos, photos, shopping sites, and more.

10. Techrigy: This company makes it easier and simpler to monitor your business’ reputation online.

11. Keotag: Match blogs with tags that reflect talk about your business or related topics using this tool.

12. UpdatePatrol: This tool makes it easy to watch websites for updates and changes, which can sometimes be useful when you want to know what a particular site is saying about you.

13. BrandsEye: Hook up with this company to get stats and other information on where your business or blog reputation stands online.

Blog Tools

With the great proliferation of blogs out there, it’s worth your time to keep track of what’s being said about you on them. These tools make it easy and convenient to do just that.

1. Zuula: If you want to get posts just from blogs, try out this search engine. Users can also limit results to photos or videos.

2. SezWho: Follow who’s important in the blogging world and what they may be saying about you with this tool. Also useful to find out where your personal blog may stand.

3. Technorati: Whether you’re blogging personally or professionally, listing your blog with Technorati can be a big help in managing your online reputation. You’ll get updates whenever someone links to your blog so you can keep tabs on what people are saying about you or your business.

4. BackType: BackType is a service that lets you find, follow, and share comments from across the Web, allowing you to keep track of where you’ve been and what you’ve said on blogs.

5. TweetBeep: TweetBeep will let you keep track of conversations on Twitter than mention you or your business or anything else you’d like to track.

6. co.mments: When you sign up for an account with this site you’ll be able to track comments and conversations that can influence your online reputation.

7. Blogpulse: Keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the blogging world, especially in relation to your business using the tools offered on this site.

8. Trendpedia: For businesses, this can be a valuable tool to track when and what your business is getting attention for and how you’re doing compared to your competitors.

9. Twist: Twist allows users to compare mentions of several different topics and view recent tweets about each one, making it easy to track info about businesses.

10. monitter: This tool lets you do much the same as Twist, but you can monitor topics in real-time or by geographic region.

11. Buzzlogic: Track buzz in the blogging world with this site, and find out just who’s word matters when it comes to blogs.

Profile Management

These tools make it easier to keep track of your social networking profiles and your online reputation in turn.

1. Comwat: Use Comwat to organize your social networking profiles into one so that its easier for others to find and easier to control what they see.

2. onXiam: Here you can establish a central online identity, use this identity to link up all your other sites, and even promote this new online location as well.

3. OtherEgo: Show off everything that you’re involved in on the net through this centralized site.

4. Zoolit: Check out this landing page service that makes it super easy to manage all the social networks you’ve been using.

5. Venyo: From lengthy blogs to simple comments, this site allows you to access everything you’ve done online, building up a trustworthy reputation at the same time.

6. ProfileMat: Pull all your existing online profiles together into a “mat” and allow users to comment on this new singular profile instead.

7. SimplifID: This site allows users to organize the online world by creating one central place you can access your blogs, social networking sites and more, allowing you to categorize it by type of viewer.

8. SocialURL: Here you can connect all your online identities by linking your social networking profiles to one URL.

9. ProfileBuilder: Want to create a professional looking profile using material from your existing social networks? This site lets you do just that, keeping or blocking the elements you choose and giving you a super useful home page to visit.

Managing Your Reputation

These tools allow you to hunt down what’s being said about you and find out just what others think of you or your business.

1. Naymz: Give this site a try to get feedback from people you’ve worked with, customers and friends.

2. Rapleaf: Here you can look up your personal or professional reputation, rate other people and businesses and get your own ratings.

3. RepVine: Using a search engine is the easiest way for people who want to know about you to find out more. This site helps you to manage what they find when they do this.

4. Keotag: Manage the blogsphere with this site that allows users to find tagged blog posts over several blog search engines.

5. TrustPl.us: Are you trustworthy? This site works by analyzing your or more like your business’ trust scores and giving you a ranking.

6. Reputation Armor: If you’ve found information about yourself online that’s less than true or extremely damaging to you, try out the services of this company that helps you get things said about you online removed.

7. FriendFeed: Whether you want to keep up with what your friends are looking at or keep up with what’s being said about you personally, this site is a useful tool.

8. Social Media Fire Hose: This accommodating tool tracks your name, brand or product across sites like Digg, FriendFeed and others that specialize in social media.

9. Trackur: If you’re willing to shell out for a little help monitoring your reputation, Trackur is a grand choice with tools that will search through all kinds of sites from social media to video.

10. Radian6: This tool makes it easier to monitor social media, frequently to the benefit of businesses who can use the information to their benefit to build better reputations and products.

11. Cision: For a fee, this tool can help you keep an eye on “100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites.”

12. Web of Trust: Make certain your website is considered trusted by joining up with this site. After all, no one wants to be associated with a dangerous site- it’s just bad for business.

General Tools

If you haven’t already, bookmark these sites which can be a big help in maintaining your reputation optimistically online.

1. Digg: Check out Digg often to see if anyone has submitted stories about your or your business.

2. Reddit: comparable to Digg, this site will allow you to see how much interest there is you on the Web.

3. delicious: This social bookmarking site is a excellent place to see if your webpage or information about you or your business is being passed around by others.

4. Flickr: Think there may be some less-than-impressive photos of you out there? Trying searching this photo site to see if you come up.

5. Facebook: Facebook can be a great place to network, just make certain you keep your profile free from things you wouldn’t want spread about you online.

6. MySpace: With millions of visitors, this popular social networking site can be a great place to get your and your business’ name out there.

7. LinkedIn: Here you can create a professional profile that will allow you to interact with others in your profession in a safe and positive manner.

8. Google: There’s no easier way to find out what your online reputation is than to do a simple Google search.

9. Rollyo: If you want a more customized option for searching, try out this great search engine that you can mold to your online reputation finding needs.

10. Furl: an additional social bookmarking site, here you can track who’s interested in your sites.

11. Twitter: Whether you want to communicate with others or follow the noise about you on the net, Twitter is an essential tool.

12. Wordpress: If you’re going to create a blog to be the face of you or your company, this site makes it easy to do so.