If you’re running a local business you need to take every opportunity to both manage your business’ reputation while reaching out to your local clientele, especially when that opportunity comes at no cost. Some of the best of these no-cost resources for local businesses are the local listings such as Google Places, Yahoo Local, and Yelp.

There are three primary reasons for claiming your local listings through these providers:

1) Claiming your local listings provides an easy to use platform to publish your contact information, hours of operation, directions, etc. You can also engage in reputation management practices such as responding to negative reviews and building optimized profiles. Photos, video, coupons, and special offers can also be added to these sites.

2) Neglecting to claim your listings can reduce your local visibility, pose risks to your company’s reputation, and assist your competition. While some local resources will publish a skeleton description of your business, others may not post anything at all. For example, if someone is trying to find your business but you’re not listed, the chances are that they will move on to a business that is listed. An unclaimed local listing can also look sloppy with fuzzy pictures and random information – not what you’re looking for in terms of making a good first impression.

3) Local pages give you another opportunity to occupy rankings on the front pages of the search engines, a critical element of proactive reputation management.  

The search engines have made huge advances in terms of helping local businesses to get found by their local customers. Gaining that visibility while managing your reputation at no cost is the kind of deal you just don’t see every day.   

The difference between an investment and an expense is typically seen as one of them costs money (an expense) while the other provides a return on capital, at least in theory. One of the more common perceptions regarding the practice of reputation management puts it in the expense category due to the costs involved when a company is trying to protect itself from negative content posted around the web.

It doesn’t take much to generate a bad review on a site like Yelp. In fact, for businesses with heavy customer traffic, whether online or at a physical storefront, it’s really a matter of time before something happens that rubs someone the wrong way. The unfortunate aspect of this new dynamic is that a negative review is a negative review; whether the person posting it is has a legitimate beef or not. So how should you handle a negative review?

The importance of managing your local business’ reputation cannot be understated, but you probably have a long “to-do” list already. With that in mind, here are a few tips on reputation management that won’t take a lot of time but might just save you money, time and headaches down the road.

Reputation management problems can originate from an almost unlimited variety of sources including those that are started by the people inside a company. A recent example of a company starting its own reputation management firestorm comes from a small company in Livingston, Montana named Wilcoxon’s Ice Cream. Started in 1912, the company has intentionally kept a virtually invisible profile with the media for entirety of its existence.

While organized efforts along the lines of corporate espionage to damage a competitor’s reputation do occur, the vast majority of reputation management headaches are simply the result of the honest complaints from unsatisfied consumers.

Complaints are a fact of life for any business. The cold fact is that while the experience you provide or how your product performs may satisfy 99 people out of 100, there is still that one person out of a hundred that will express negative sentiments and pose the potential of becoming a reputation management problem.

One of the biggest changes brought forth by the internet is the leveling of the field between major media outlets and individuals on the web. With the internet empowering anyone with a computer and an internet connection to publish online, the sources for content on the web are now virtually limitless.

Those big advertising budgets just don’t buy what they used to, especially when it comes to brand building and reputation management. The reason? In the not too distant past, the majority of what consumers knew about the products they were interested in was dished to them through slick advertising campaigns channeled through traditional media outlets.

The First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, is one of the foundations on which this country was built. It is also the reason you should start and online reputation management initiative for your business as soon as possible. As more online businesses realize every day, sometimes to their dismay, nowhere is the First Amendment on display more than on the internet.

As review sites become a larger factor in reputation management strategies as well as the decision-making process for consumers, business owners increasingly face the temptation of gaming the review process for ratings and recommendations. To be sure, there are right and wrong ways to generate reviews.

Wall Street has a reputation management issue that isn’t going to go away any time soon. Wracked by financial failures, scandals, and the Occupy Wall Street movement decrying exorbitant executive pay among other things, Wall Street’s reputation issues are affecting three primary areas that can be summed up as the three “R’s”.