It is important to start with social media site accounts for your online reputation management. Once you have accounts for your brand, it is a simple matter of continuing to monitor what is said about your company. The following is a guide for how to monitor your online reputation.
Begin with a Google search or search engine search. What is being said about your company in the first page? You hope your main website and all official social media pages are going to appear in the first page; however, you might find negative information about your company is actually posting in the top spots for the day.
The next step is to go to individual social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Do a search for your brand name. You can include any misspellings if you wish. See what appears in the results. If you have only the official page come up then your online reputation management is working. No one else has decided to create a fan page and create an issue with misinformation or confusion. Having multiple fan pages is nice if the information is positive, but since everyone can set up a fan page you do need to track this. Make certain if there are multiple fan pages on Facebook that you do a quick post redirecting all fans to your official site. The same can also be done on Twitter. Find Twitter posts which are talking about your brand and redirect them to your official Twitter page.
It is time consuming to conduct online reputation management. In general you may want to get into the habit of checking your social media pages and any fan pages which have been started each week. By monitoring your pages each week you are able to see what activity has occurred and if there are any negative fires you need to put out.
There are a couple of tools out there where you can monitor social media. These monitoring tools like Social Media Analytics measure social media engagement. You also have Raventools.com which is a monitoring tool. This tool looks for any mentions or attitudes that might crop up about your brand. The only way these tools work is on public comments such as publicly viewed comments on fan pages. For how to monitor your online reputation these tools are one way to make your weekly online reputation management a little less time consuming.