Watch my latest FREE webinar where I cover 7 Essential Tips for Generating and Retaining More Business Using LinkedIn? You can leave your feedback at my Marketing Mentor Facebook Page

So do you monitor your company, brand or even personal reputation online?

The area of online reputation management was the subject of an interview I did this week with a journalist (I’ll share the article with you once it’s been published).

I shared in the interview that in many of the events and workshops I lead, it’s not unusual for 100% of people to mention that they have searched online for information about a business, a person or a brand in the last 14 days.

I then ask the question of whether they are ‘ego surfing’ and checking what people will find when they search for them by name online or the company and I rarely get more than 10 – 15% saying they have monitored their brand online in the last month.

Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing for BearingPoint has recently released a report about reputation management in today’s world of Web 2.0 and social media..

It’s not clear of the geography or type of respondents (most of the survey questions were answered by around 85-87 people), but for those of you interested in ’sound bites’ about this increasingly important area here are some summary statistics:

•  60% of respondents reported their company has a strong understanding of it’s current reputation

• 63% of respondents to the online reputation survey say their company does not have a formal policy relating to employee blogs
• 53% of respondents to the online reputation survey agree that measuring and monitoring their reputation is a strategic priority in 2008
• 58% of respondents reported that their company does not have a strategic plan in place to manage their online reputation
• 54% of respondents report that they do not use a service to monitor traditional media
• 63% of respondents report that they monitor social media using free online tools such as Google Alerts
• 77% of respondents report that they do not use a paid for monitoring service to track discussions on blogs, forums and message boards
• 56% of companies report that they are leveraging social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace as a customer touch point
• 45% of respondents report that they are monitoring their reputation on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace
• 45% of respondents agree that their organisation is adequately prepared to manage an online reputation crisis situation.

It’s great to have these as benchmark statistics, though I don’t believe we would find the same results here in Europe – certainly that’s not my experience with the companies I speak with and work with.

The fact of the matter is that your clients are talking about you, your customers are talking about you, your employees are talking about you, the people you have just made redundant are talking about you – and they are all people who have had a personal experience of you, your company, your brands and products.

While I’d love to see more organisations seriously consider developing and implementing social media solutions to support their business strategy, the place we all have to start is by tracking and monitoring our reputation online.

Take note of what your potential brand ambassadors are saying about you – and what they are NOT saying about you.

Is it what you want to hear?

Is it what you expect?

Now what are you going to do about it?

ATTRIBUTION: Thanks to Andy Beal for the alerting me to this report