The dominant question this article by the BBC asks is, could the internet kill your business? The answer is a resounding yes. Offline businesses can be injured, or even shut down, by online comments about those businesses. Business owners are often aghast at what online commenters say about their establishments.

When prospective clients looked her up on Google, she says, details of the case popped up on that all-important first page. “All you saw was this docket, that I’d been sued. But it didn’t tell the whole story, it comes up as a black mark, but it didn’t talk about the settlement.” Ms Posoli-Cilli’s customers are among the wealthiest consumers in the world. They rarely appear on commercially available mailing lists, and they value their security and privacy.

The article linked above cites a number of anecdotes which serve as evidence, but if you think about it–you don’t need a BBC journalist to provide you with evidence of this, you know it’s true. The online world has an importance now that it lacked a decade ago–the search engines alone direct so much traffic that to have a bad reputation on a search engine could be the death knell for your company. This is why reputation management has become as popular as it has–because a need arose for it.

Online reputation management is not a totally new industry, though it is a totally new manifestation of an old industry. Image consulting, PR work–these are the precursors and parallel industries that make online reputation management so important. Managing your reputation online is just a extension of your reputation in general. With that said, people too often neglect the online aspect of their reputations because having to worry about this aspect is a more recent development.

More and more individuals are searching cyberspace and the online reputations of those seeking employment, a romantic interest, or customers for their business. While the Google, Yahoo, Ask, AOL and Bing search engines have become the de facto public record of modern time, reputation management consultants believe you have a right to control how your name is presented online.

Bing, Google, MSN, Dogpile–these are just a couple of the search engines where you can find out information about other people. If you plug your name into these search engines, you’ll likely be greeted by nothing nefarious. However, for a select few of you readers, you’ll be met with something that is negative. For you, online reputation management just became a reality.