B2B networking or any other kind of peer networking is going to put your name in circulation. Online reputation management has become a necessity, especially for college students whose grand ambitions might be subverted by indiscreet FaceBook photos.

“With the explosion of Social Media in the last 6 months, there’s a lot of new places that marketers and business people need to start monitoring their reputation on. From search engines to forums to social news sites, knowing who’s talking about your company, its executives, your products or services online, is every more important. Social media, whether marketers like it or not, is here and it’s where Word of Mouth Marketing is starting and it also affects Search Engine results.”

The above from SearchMarketingGurus.com who go on to suggest 31 different places where you can keep tabs on what is being said about your company, brand, or you.

The “Blogosphere” arouses a good deal of anxiety, referred to as the “wild west” where, as easily as you can achieve fortuitous fame, you can just as quickly sink to the nadir of notoriety.

“The wild, wild west of the internet, where a bad name can be created with one blog post, otherwise known as the Blogosphere. The most recent example of this is Jennifer Laycock’s incident with the National Pork Board. Within hours, the blogosphere went wild with this story. There have been other incidents like the Kryptonite Bike Lock incident, Microsoft’s giving laptops to bloggers, and Edelman & Walmart’s Flogging come right to the forefront of my mind. You need to keep an eye on the blogosphere, set up feeds to check what’s being posted about you, or look to see what kind of “buzz” is around your reputation.”
(Source)