Reputation management is not always about what you do with your site. It is not always what you don’t do either. Sometimes it is a good idea to sit back and watch what your competitors are doing. Often you can learn much either from their successes or, more importantly, their failures.

I shouldn’t just limit that statement to your competitors either. Just watching others from within your genre can be interesting.

What is more important is to listen to what is being said about your competitors. Sometimes you can find a real opportunity when you start to hear complaints about what your competitors are not doing – or perhaps, what they are doing that is upsetting customers.

Likewise, if you are a product distributor, what is being said about that product? Discovering this information early can have you well placed to answer concerns from prospective customers.

Reputation management is as much about listening as it is about doing. Spending time reviewing what is being said can save you the discomfort of unpleasant surprises; provide you with an opportunity to prepare; and perhaps even provide new opportunities.

Learn to listen, learn to watch, learn to read the reputation management social environment.

The more social networking you do, the better you must get at reputation management.

“Social networking.”

The phrase sounds so … businesslike. Let’s try another one:

“Social backbiting.”

Ooh! Might be fun to eavesdrop on THAT one! Unless, of course, YOU are the one whose back is being bitten.

If you’re active in social networking, your ideas will be attacked by other marketers. You’ll be challenged by strangers. Or customers. Or even colleagues or friends.

Someone will rail against your thinking and try to intimidate you. They’ll be rude. They will try to look good by making you look bad. It’s important to have a good reputation management plan in place for these occasions.

So what do you do when you make what you thought was a helpful comment on one of the forum communities, and in return you get hostility – someone else in the community slams you or ridicules you?

This absolutely will happen if you are an active social networker. Consider yourself fortunate. You now have an enormous opportunity to bond more closely with a lot of others in the community. Because they see that you are in a very uncomfortable situation, which is OK with them, because it should be pretty entertaining. They are watching closely to see what you do.

Your first reaction may be a kamikaze scream and attack. But remember, you are onstage, in the spotlight. You know these situations will happen, so you need a reputation management plan. Here are some choices:

1. Do nothing – which means you absolutely lose face in this group.
2. React defensively or angrily – see #1.
3. Pull the ol’ switcheroo, positioning yourself above this silly fray.

It’s like jiujitsu. When the other person attacks you, the force they use and their momentum always leave them vulnerable in some way. What would be really useful is for the whole community to picture you as your attacker’s infinitely patient mentor.

The key word here is “patient,” because along with expertise, that is what your market wants from a mentor. You will probably have the words for some clever counter-attack screaming in your ear. Resist it. When those words show up in print, they will put you right in the middle of the battle, not above it.

What words can you say to achieve “patient mentor” effect?

You might start with:

• “That’s a pretty common reaction” or
• “I forgive you” or
• “I respect your opinion. Here’s what I’ve seen …”

Then go on to very patiently explain why people often go off in this totally wrong direction. You’ve seen it a thousand times before. Maybe refer to the flawed reasoning that goes hand-in-hand with this flawed thinking. But do NOT attack your attacker. Let the community see your superior reasoning ability and your your infinite patience. Let them see that you are 100% unflappable in the face of a full-on attack.

Do you think THAT picture of you in their minds will create any new social networking opportunities for you? If you can keep that picture in the heads of community members, you will need to do very little active reputation management.

“Googling” is everywhere. We’ve all heard of employees getting fired – or applicants not hired – because of their Facebook or MySpace profile. And when you search for a potential employer, you might find a list of lawsuits, complaints and “IHateAcme.com” websites. Or you might find a list of company press releases. Either way, there’s a good chance what you find will influence your impression.

To monitor that “you” brand:

1. Set up Google Alerts for your name
2. Check Technorati regularly for your name in blogs
3. Check Google Video for your name in videos

How can you help make sure that your “YOU” brand shows up positively & accurately?

Don’t reveal everything to the world in your social networking profiles or on your blogs. Think what you would want to find in the social media if you were hiring “you”. Then create a professional profile to match for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.

Register “yourname.com”, if it’s available. If not, get the .net domain or .org or one of the others. Set up a blog, if you don’t have one, with this domain name. Anyone who links will probably use your name for anchor text. Your blog can link to your Facebook profile, or YouTube video, or Flickr photos, etc. You can write up a bio for your “About me” page & link to a resume.

Link from your blog to your articles posted online, and to the positive pages created about you. Be sure to go to Digg & StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites to bookmark these pages.

Whenever you put something online, remind yourself: “This is eternal.” Because it pretty much is.

You don’t need to do all this reputation management today. But long-range, this plan will strengthen that brand of “YOU.”

Every day you see new online gizmos and offline gadgets that put more power in the hands of consumers. A consumer can find your website this morning, subscribe, have some annoying experience which may or may not have been your fault, focus their anger in a quickie audio & video commentary, edit it, post it, bookmark it, link to it, and by tonight it could have been seen and/or read by tens of thousands of people. By tomorrow? It could go viral, and the universe will have seen it.

Today’s social networking media has created a world of Walter Cronkites. (If you’re under 30, he used to be on TV.)

What can you do to prepare for all of today’s new scrutiny? Some reputation management tips:

1. Listen to what consumers are saying. Use tools that allow you to find and recognize problems quickly, before someone uploads their investigative video. Monitor talk about your brand. Be sure to subscribe to daily newsfeeds for your brand and your keywords. A lot of sudden activity means you need to look more closely.

2. Consumer-reporters are out there 24/7 looking for material. Number one on their list is exposing bad customer service. Since it’s everywhere, bad customer service is easy to find. So improve your customer service, and let the bloodhounds sniff some other trail.

3. Make all your public communications as consumer-focused as possible. Talk about what you hear in #1 above. When people know you are listening to them, they are way less likely to attack.

They are watching you. With a few low-cost tools, anyone could be a professional spy. So guard your reputation. It’s good business sense to tweak your marketing plan to give your public the best possible experience in every area of your business. Don’t give the spies anything to talk about. Who knows? A good reputation management plan may cause some consumer/reporter to fall in love with you and upload their “good vibrations” video about your company. It does happen.

Back on Friday we talked about a controversial post that showed up on TechCrunch this week. The author of that original post, Dan Ackerman Greenberg , has now asked TechCrunch to allow him to follow it up and how he does not endorse the actions he talked about, he was just trying to educate the world that those things happen.

Whatever the case may be, the damage to Mr. Greenberg’s reputation has been done. People will find the original post, but that does not mean they will find his follow up. He claims that he is a victim of poor editing, but from my own experiences with editing, there would have had to of been a far more extensive editing than I have ever seen to make him sound the way he did.

And that’s the lesson to be learned here: Before you do anything online, especially in a highly visible location, ask yourself if it could be taken in any sort of negative light. The Internet is a massive place, and people sometimes people think, “Oh, no one will ever find this”, and you couldn’t be more wrong. Think twice before you post ANYTHING on the web.