As we may have established a long time ago, I'm a bit of a geek. That's why I find the latest online PR/Marketing trends interesting. Brand name and reputation have always been an important part of building a business. Once a company has built up a good name and respected reputation, the challenge then becomes maintaining that good will. The world wide web, email and SMS make spreading the word (positive or negative) quick and easy for a majority of consumers. Clearly then this presents a number of new challenges for organisations attempting to maintain their position in the market. It is also true that many companies are not equipped to handle these challenges. With all this in mind, brand reputation management has become big business. Monitoring the blog world for negative coverage, maintaining a high search engine ranking and firing off electronic news items are all time consuming activities that many organisations don't have the time or resources to do themselves.

If your running a business, do a quick google search on your brand name. If your search returns sites which speak negatively of your brand or your product, then it's probably time to think about getting some help! As an example, I did a quick google search for Nestle Baby Food (I remember seeing a less than positive documentary on this when I was in High School). Looking at the results, around half of those on the first page could be seen as negative. Actually, based on reading some of those pages, I think Nestle needs to do a lot more than just take care of their brand image!