Internet and Businesses Online

Online reputation management or ORM, is the process of consistently researching and analyzing a person's personal, professional, industry or business reputation, which is represented by user generated content and all kinds of online media. Online reputation management is also known as online reputation monitoring.

Online reputation management is a new industry. But it has successfully attracted the consciousness of professionals due to the unpredictable and sometimes overwhelming nature of amateur user generated content or journalistic contents by professionals. This industry is growing due to the large number of user friendly social media websites which can easily accessed by filling up a simple registration form.

The type of online content to be monitored by ORM includes professional content sponsored by big media giants as well as user generated contents like blogs, reviews, comments, ratings and all types of specialized websites regardless of any subject like group, company, person, trend, concept, event etc.

Basically, the need for management of user generated media gave birth to online reputation management.

As user generated media increased with rise in social media and social networking sites, the search results of major search engines were also affected.

EBay was one of the earliest and first website companies which used the power of user generated media feedback. By using CGM (consumer/user generated media) feedback rating the sellers and buyers were given reputations which helped the other users in making decisions regarding the buying and selling of products .Reputation defender was among the first website companies to offer management of online reputations. Another company which made early efforts to promote online reputation management on personal level was ClaimID. A few other online reputation management tools are trackur, Google alerts and Brandseye.

Examples of online media monitored by ORM are:

1) Social networks like Facebook, Orkut , Myspace etc.

2) Review sites like epinions and Mouthshut.

3) Sites which allow to review an individuals like personratings dot com

4) Social Bookmarking websites like Digg and Stumbleupon.

5) Blogs

6) Discussion forums etc.

7) Blogging communities like opendiary, livejournal etc

8) Micro blogs like twitter, plurk etc

Reputation management can be beneficial in many ways. It can help a lot in improving the customer satisfaction by analyzing the customer`s point of view about a product or a service. ORM can also help in accessing the position of your competitor`s product or service in the market. You can easily create a list of keyword phrases which are used to find your product or services on the internet.