Once you start engaging online and building out your personal brand you will begin to see more and more SERPs coming up for your name. Some will be great, others won’t be as great and it’s up to you to make sure that you are on top of things. This is called Online Reputation Management.

What is it?
Online Reputation Management is when you actively monitor you brand or a company’s brand online. This can be through a variety of tools, and strategies. ORM (as it is often referred to) also involves shaping a brand’s results to provide the most value accurate and positive results when someone searching for your brand online.

Learn more about it…
There are a number of sites out there committed to explaining and reporting on the topic of online reputation management. Here are a few great ORM blogs worth subscribing to:

TopRankBlog.com: Lee Odden covers all aspects of the search industry but focuses a great deal of this blogs content on reputation management. He offers best practices and lists of resources you should definitely check out.

ReputationAdvisor.com: Covers all aspects of ORM as well as aggregates the daily stories across the web on online reputation management and the challenges you face when monitoring a brand.

Andy Beal & ORM: Andy is the primary behind MarketingPilgrim.com, a very popular marketing blog for the search and social space. He is an industry leader when it comes to ORM, and has even build out his own monitoring tool for small to medium size companies.

ReputationProfessor.com: Posts range from ORM basics to more high-level ethical dilemmas that occur when monitoring and shaping a brand online.

In addition to online resources there are also thousands of ORM agencies providing this service to you at cost. Depending on your needs this may be something you want to consider, but for the most part you can monitor your brand online with a number of free (or minimal cost) tools available to you.

Tools to help you manage it…
Monitoring your brand can be very time consuming if you attempt to benchmark results by hand and search manually. Instead you should consider implementing an establish ORM toolset or platform to help provide you with the data needed to evaluate the position of your brand. Here are a few of our favorites:

Technorati: Is a popular blog search engine which scans millions of blog posts in real time. In addition it enables you to see the authority and reach of influence of every blog. You can use this engine to track how popular your digital footprint is and to search out possible blogs you may want to work with to build your name in a particular vertical.

TwitterSearch.com: This is the search engine piece to the infamous micro-blogging sites Twitter.com. You can go in there and search brand names, user names, and more. You can then see every tweet that has mentioned any of your search queries. It’s a great way to gauge sentiment around a person or brand.

Google Alerts: This has always been one of my favorites. Google allows you to put I a term or brand and then have email alerts sent to you when it is mentioned on the web. You can choose daily or weekly alerts. This is an excellent way to keep tabs on where you are being mentioned and how your brand is presented.

Trackur: is an online reputation & social media monitoring tool which tracks what is said about you on the internet. The reputation tool scans millions of web pages--including news, blogs, video, images, and forums--and returns data on how you were mentioned enabling you to monitor your online presence.

Experts worth following on ORM...
These days there are so many ways to connect with experts in any field. One great option is to seek out industry leaders on Twitter, follow them and start engaging with them. There is so much to learn and hopefully those online connections evolve into offline ones. Here are a few people you should be following when hoping to learn online reputation management from the best:

Tony N. Wright: Interactive Marketing, Search Marketing and Reputation Management Geek

Barry Hurd: President of 123socialmedia.com, speaker and author on competitive intelligence, online business development and Enterprise 2.0

Leslie-Gaines-Ross: Online reputation strategist at a digital agency

Rhea Drysdale: Co-founder OutspokenMedia.com, online reputation management expert

ReputationDefender: The latest in Internet privacy and social media news from the world's leader in Online Reputation Management.

Patricia Skinner: Performance Marketing: SEO, social media, reputation managment.

Andy Beal: CEO of Trackur.com, author of Radically Transparent and editor of MarketingPilgrim.com.

Final thoughts on ORM:
As a wrap-up we thought we would leave you with some simple things to get started with. When it comes to online reputation management success is usually found by remaining active and sincerely engaging. Although it might take some time, there is nothing more important than making sure all of your hard work online is returning in value. By keeping an eye on where you are discussed and listening to how people are receiving you, you are able to handle any misconceptions or issues quickly and efficiently.

When it comes to online communication there is a lot of noise. It is easy for things to be misconstrued or people to misuse your brand. Keeping an eye on the landscape, and keeping an active hand in how your brand is being used will make all the difference.