Angie’s List has been compiling consumer reviews since 1995 and invests significant resources in an accountability process that it hopes other online outlets will follow. At the top of that list is the prohibition of anonymous reporting.

In March, a Dallas-based Internet marketing and online reputation management firm Dalfort Media confirmed what the New York Times, the FTC and state regulators already believe: fake positive reviews on consumer review sites are rampant. Based on ten “red-flag” factors, the Dalfort Media study found that 57% of the reviews for a sampling of businesses in the Google Places directory appeared to be fabricated.

Many companies are now manipulating their reviews and, instead of hiding negative publicity, they’re creating fake positive-publicity.

Monitoring your brand online is getting simpler and simpler by the day. It’s becoming clear that hiring a reputation management firm not only is a wasted expense but something your in-house marketing team can do itself if trained in the right tools and methodologies.

After all, why spend money on defending a brand when you can spend money promoting a brand? Unfortunately for the unsuspecting client, there are some reputation management companies that are nothing more than snake oil salesmen who over promise and under deliver and in return drain your business of critical capital.

However, when it comes to negative publicity, there really is no replacement for a full-time online reputation management professional.

Consider setting up alerts for the store’s name — including alternative spellings — the store’s web address, and the names of key store employees. It may also be a good idea to monitor what’s being said about competitors and key products too. The service offers weekly, daily, and “As it happens” updates. Consider trying daily at first.

In addition to Google Alerts, make a habit of searching for these same terms on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, and similar sites. Try creating a recurring to-do in calendar software or similar as a reminder to run these searches at least weekly.

This is a pretty simple system to set up and while it’s not full proof, it works pretty well.

Businesses that are not carefully managing their online reputation, risk losing highly qualified candidates to their competitors. Companies that have negative reviews online, but otherwise enjoy loyalty and support from their staff can encourage their current employees to leave reviews that more accurately reflect reality and offer prospective employees a wider variety of opinions upon which to base a decision, rather than relying on what could be a small number of disgruntled former employees.

Companies have every incentive to look after the negative publicity that is so popular online. It could deprive them of the best employees in their industry.

To avoid any indecent Internet exposure, some of the city’s biggest institutions are snapping up corresponding domain names ending in “.xxx” to make sure they are never bought by or associated with adult entertainment websites.Mary Rodgers, who works in marketing and communications at the city, said the IT department had just purchased www.citywindsor.xxx on Tuesday.

“It’s to protect our reputation,” Rodgers said. “We’re not going to use it, but we own it.”

Basically, they have purchased these websites in order to avoid the negative publicity that would surely go along with someone else buying and using them.

When unhappy patients post these kinds of comments about physicians online, doctors’ reputations — and their practices — can suffer.

Reviews by patients have become common as blogs and review websites proliferate on the Internet. But doctors are seeking legal remedies to battle alleged online libel and defamation.

The solution is very rarely a lawsuit. Usually, legal means cannot help you–but web reputation management can.

Whether readers should be allowed to post comments that could damage a public official’s stature is at the heart of a civil suit a Milford official is bringing against anonymous online posters.

An attorney representing Paul Mazzuchelli, who is the Milford health agent and a Milford School Committee member, says online comments posted by anonymous writers on the Milford Daily News website damaged his client’s reputation.

Negative publicity can be so damaging that often people will overreact and file lawsuits. Generally speaking, these lawsuits will recieve more publicity for the negative comments than they otherwise would have received.

Negative publicity cannot be allowed to stand–it can do a great deal of damage if not properly responded to or taken care of. Negative publicity often finds its way to the top of the search results. For example, if you Google Tiger Woods or Rachel Ray, you will immediately be confronted with negative links about them, despite the fact there is a great deal of positive information about them out there. Some, like Tiger, deserve the online reputations they’ve earned. Others, like Ray, have simply attracted the attention of online malcontents and become a target.

Online reputation management can help to neutralize and then reverse the effects of negative publicity. Online reputation management is the process of replacing negative content in Google search results with positive ones.

News that Google has bought another up-and-coming search engine isn’t really a surprise, or it shouldn’t be to anyone who follows Google’s business side. They have a savvy bunch at Google. Sparkbuy was the buy and it was a smart one. The big question is–what does it mean for online reputation management services? In the short term, nothing–Sparkbuy wasn’t a big deal yet. In the long-term, it could still mean nothing, or it could mean everything, it’s hard to say how this acquisition and the absorption of the Sparkbuy team will affect Google. Certainly Google has reason to breath easier–they have no online reputation problem to worry about when they continually dominate the search industry.

A similar pattern emerges in the relatively recent rise of online reputation management as an industry. Not restricted to the increasingly-saturated (and potentially outmoded) field of SEO, reputation management takes into consideration the overall visibility of its clients — most notably, in the area of third-party and user-generated content.

The reputation management services industry was created in response to the misuse of search engine results pages. Websites like Yelp and Ripoff Report are common problems for companies because they are controlled by anonymous reviewers with an agenda. Web savvy users are aware of the issue of online reputation, but many people still don’t understand the industry or how it works.