Anyway, as far as I can glean, "reputation management" refers to exactly what you say, of putting your best foot forward in the digital world. The issue is really what do people find when they search for you on a Search engine like Google or Ask or Sites like Orkut or Facebook or Flickr, or any other social network or online venue.

It's nuanced too because if your name is, say "Pramathesh Borkotoky", but you sometimes write online as "DJ Boks" and somewhere indicate that the latter is a pen name for Pramathesh, then the dots can be connected and you need to worry about not only what your own name reveals, but what your pseudonyms reveal too.

This is really a significant issue for people just graduating college too. It might seem fun at the time to have a blog entry on your MySpace account about how you and your buddies crashed a sorority party and slipped some drugs into their water supply, but when you're trying to get a job two years later with a reputable company like Infosys or Satyam, you've now got a significant digital liability you need to overcome.

Worse, imagine that you're a popular industry figure (or company!) and in addition to your fans, you also have quite a cadre of detractors. You know, the ones that register the "sucks.com" domain (like "walmartsucks.com" or "dellsucks.com"). Further, imagine that when someone searches for you (or Walmart or Dell) that these detractor sites come up ahead of your own in Google. That's a very serious problem and one that isn't trivially solved.

You can't sue them because of freedom of speech, parody laws, offshore hosting, etc. Even if you could, it's probably not a smart approach anyway. Instead, what you want to do is virtually stuff the ballot box and ensure that the top matches are positive, are information that you control. That's really reputation management at the topmost level.

How do you get your own material to the top of the heap? By producing good quality original content that other people find sufficiently valuable that they link to it and thereby cast online votes towards its value.

As with any other corner of the industry, there are now books out on reputation management, including Reputation Management: The Key to Successful Public Relations and Corporate Communications by John Doorley and Helio Fred Garcia, New Strategies for Reputation Management: Gaining Control of Issues, Crises & Corporate Social Responsibility by Andrew Griffin, Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness by Gary Davies, Reputation Management by Gerry Griffin, Radically Transparent by my friend Andy Beal and Judy Strauss and, of course, a title that has an enumeration too: The 18 Immutable Laws of Corporate Reputation: Creating, Protecting, and Repairing Your Most Valuable Asset by Ronald J. Alsop and Ron Alsop.

It's all about tracking actions and the opinions of others about a particular person/company then working out a reaction or plan to work with these actions and/or what is being said about the company/person. Done correctly reputation management can be an extremely powerful tool in today's day and age.

Check this email service. SuretyMail, which is all about email reputation management. Check it out if you do lots of mailing to customers.

So there you go. I hope that helps you understand what reputation management is all about in the digital age. Make Sure Search Engines Like You.