8 Tools For Online Reputation Management

Managing your online reputation has become a must. It is absolutely unthinkable for anyone who wants to make a professional appointment to leave a dodgy photograph on his facebook profile since there are many chances that the person with whom he is about to have an appointment has just gone straight to 'Google' his name on the Internet. This is what is called online reputation management (aka ORM), that is to say your image as it is showing online through Internet and social media exposure.

Here are 8 kinds of tools which could help you work on your online reputation:

1. metasearch engines for social media such as http://samepoint.com , will help you check whether you are popular online or not. Samepoint will combine results from various sources such as social networking sites (facebook, mybloglog, linkedin, typepad, wordpress.com, blogger etc.), wikis, bookmarking sites such as delicious and others. I used my own example and I found out my samepoint request could produce up to 1000 results. Not very surprising in fact, because this is the effect of my online work for the past 15 years,
2. blog search engines such as technorati or http://blogsearch.google.com make up the second kind of tools which you can use to manage your online reputation. Obviously, the more your write on blogs, including other people's blogs of course, not just your own, the better your chances to increase your online reputation. Eventually, you will establish the credibility through your writing,
3. news search engines such as Google News which are not only scouring the Net for information from newspapers and press releases but blogs too â€" as long as they have been deemed reliable sources by the Google people. For your blog to be taken into account by Google you would have to go through the manual process of getting your blog registered. Finding the right place for you to submit your URL can be a bit tricky, so here's the link which will make you save time,
4. some other search engines look for comments you may have entered on social media sites. http://www.backtype.com for instance, shows a relative low number of comments in my case. This can be explained by the fact that I'm rarely using my own name in comments, even on my own websites and blogs,
5. forum search engines, such as bigboards or Google Groups. Comments in B2C forums can sometimes be pretty direct and they don't always provide real value with regard to your online reputation. As to expert forums and technical forums however, they can be very instrumental in publicising your expertise,
6. the next category is micro-blogging search engines such as http://search.twitter.com which scans the most popular micro-blogging engine www.twitter.com. that's how you can recap on someone's tweets or even trace those who forwarded or commented on your tweets or blog posts,
7. this category consists of social network aggregators such as Yahoo's outstanding Mybloglog social website which enables you to link your blog to others and make friends with other bloggers and promote your articles,
8. the final category of online reputation tools which I'd like to present here is that of people-centric search engines. I would namely recommend http://www.123people.com and zoominfo. in zoominfo, once you have signed up, you will be also able to claim ownership of your profile.