There's been some negative publicity about the e-commerce platform that's been selected and since I write about technology on these pages every week, I've been following the story with interest.

For someone in my line of work that means setting the necessary persistent searches to make sure I see any online mention of Venda, the e-commerce vendor in question, and what was quickly revealed to me is that no one outside the the Isle of Man is talking much about Venda.

The only recent mentions of the brand originate from here and are controversial at best and negative at worst. In this case, I'm not sure that Google Search's first page for Venda gives an accurate reflection of the company and its services.

This experience offers an excellent insight into the importance of online reputation management.

You can imagine that any prospective Venda clients, who Google the company name as part of their process in choosing an e-commerce platform, will likely get a skewed perception of the company.

A few years ago I was involved in helping an Isle of Man company who was the victim of a negative blog burst. Despite my advice to be proactive, this company chose to ignore the situation in the hopes it would go away. It did eventually, but the for the longest time, these negative blog posts filled page one of Google Search, and even two years later a couple remain highly ranked.

It can't but hurt a company's reputation. But companies can't avoid negative or erroneous tittle tattle online, but there are things that can be done to redress the situation and defray damage.

A good start is monitoring the online world for whispers and buzz about products and brands. The most important part of online reputation management is being aware of what's being said, to whom and why. Effective listening requires consistency and forward planning in case action becomes necessary.

There are a lot of excellent monitoring services available which offer a range of services for a fee. But there are also a number of free easy-to-use tools online from which companies of any size can gain value.
Most people are aware of Google Alerts.

This is a free service which pushes links to mentions of key words either daily or as they happens. Google Alerts are easy to use and are a basic must do for any organisation.

However, Alerts do have limitations and so other free tools have emerged that dig a little deeper or provide specialist or contextual search.

Backtype, www.backtype.com keeps an ear on chatter from blogs, social networks and other social media. It also has an alert function similar to Google's.

BlogPulse, www.blogpulse.com is a nifty tool that not only tracks blog mentions, it analyses the findings provides graphics to track trends and converations.

Keotag, www.keotag.com, is a particularly useful tool to track keywords, including company names, that are being used as tags on the web.

It gives an insight into the buzz on Twitter, YouTube and many other social networks at the click of a mouse.

Technorati, www.technorati.com is the one of the most popular blog search engines and indexes millions of blog posts in real time.

It also offers an indication of the influence and authority of blogs to help you better understand who is talking about you.

Twittersearch, search.twitter.com, is an excellent, simple way to search for keywords and links in Twitter both in realtime and historically.

It was interesting to watch the Isle of Man Venda story move across Twitter.

Backtweets, www.backtweets.com, shows who is linking to a site on Twitter.

It's a very good tool to get a feel for what viral momentum your mention is gaining.

wwwboardtracker.com, searches discussion boards and forum threads for specified keywords. You can also sign up for e-mail alerts.

MonitorThis, www.monitorthis.com, is a search aggregator. It searches 26 search engines all at once to save time.

I'm not sure how good it is. I searched for 'Isle of Man' to test is out and it only turned up one mention!

www.purewiretrust.org, verifies reputation information about sites and people that you interact with online.

Key in an URL or email address to find out the reputational score.
Yasni, www.yasni.com, is a search engine focused on finding individuals online and includes images, videos, social networking profiles and posts.

Search for yourself to see the size of your own digital footprint.

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Sherrilynne Starkie is the managing partner of Strive Public Relations, a strategic communications consultancy serving the Isle of Man. Visit her business blog, www.strivepr.com/notes or follow her on twitter.com/sherrilynne