As a business owner your online reputation is extremely important to you. What current, former and potential clients and business partners are saying about you can boost sales or turn around and sink you. In the past, people would complain about a product or service between neighbors or the water cooler at work. Not anymore. Today’s unsatisfied clients turn to the Internet and blog about it. Now the entire world knows what’s on their mind — whether the information they post is true or not.

What’s worse is that they don’t really have to have a founded complaint or back any of their information with facts. All they need is a PC, an Internet connection, and a chip on their shoulder. Don’t encourage a barrage of negativity by commenting on a heated blog. It doesn’t take much for someone to take your remarks out of context or change your remarks and repost them.

The best thing you can do to protect yourself is search for your name on several search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Use variations of your name (e.g., first name, last name; first initial, last name, etc.). Then, type in your business or website name. Most of what you’re looking for will land on page one of the search results, but look as deep as page 10. Next, check the social media websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and any trade websites/blogs that you might belong to.

More often than not, you should simply ignore information when you find it. Adding to a blog usually aggravates your situation and places the blog higher in search engine results where it can be found more easily. A quote uttered by Winston Churchill decades before the birth of the Internet confirms this: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

If you’re facing a particularly aggressive onslaught of false information, then you should get professional and/or legal help in the form of online reputation management services. Their services range from correcting misinformation to taking full-blown legal action.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz it up
• Buzz it up
• Share via MySpace
• Share on Orkut
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend
• Print for later