With so many businesses having already turned their attention to online social networking it is little surprise that there are so many social network sites that are dedicated to businesses and those offering B2B services. Whether you’re looking for new partnerships with other companies or you would benefit from a career change, these sites can help you.

1 – iKarma

iKarma is essentially an online reputation social network for businesses. You can sign up and review businesses or you can encourage your customers to review you and improve your iKarma level as a result. Whichever side of the fence you sit, the iKarma system has been very well publicised with pieces in numerous business presses and is featured on a lot of high profile websites so it will continue to grow in popularity too.

2 – StartUpNation

StartUpNation offers “everything you need to start a business” with advice, tips, and guides included alongside a strong social network of professionals, businesses, and services. It also features a marketplace where you can give or receive quotes for those services that are relevant to you and the needs of your business.

3 – Ecademy

“Share knowledge, build your network, and grow your business” – what more could you want from a professional social network? Ecademy is not only a social network but has groups on a large number of business related categories and topics, it has an extensive event listing, and a marketplace with listings and adverts posted by Ecademy members. As well as basic membership, the BlackStar membership level offers some very beneficial features once you have an extensive network of contacts.

Most people that have used the Internet have some form of trail left behind them and for those that use social networking websites this trail is even more evident and powerful. Even people that do not use the Internet may find that they have a reputation on the Internet. What’s more, just because they don’t use the Internet doesn’t mean that employers and potential employers do not use it either. In fact, many recruiters and HR departments are beginning to realise the power of the Internet when researching and considering candidates for their posts.

Search the Internet using your name as the search query and see what shows up. Hopefully, there won’t be any negative posts and if you’ve never set up an online profile or joined sites using your name then there’s a very real chance that you won’t have an online reputation to speak of at all. However, you can change either situation to your own advantage with time and effort on your part or by using professional online reputation management services to do the work for you.

It isn’t just information and comments posted by others that should concern you. If you’re a member of Facebook or other social networking websites then you need to check that your account profile is in order. Search engines regularly crawl these pages and some of them carry a lot of weight when search results pages are created. Even a seemingly innocent comment, taken out of context, can cause trouble if a potential employer reads it.

There’s a social network for just about every topic or category.

There’s mobile social networks, professional ones, and various categories of social site like social news sites, social media sites, and social bookmarking sites.

What’s more, despite Facebook’s member list seeming to boast otherwise, not everybody uses the same network; some of your friends may use Facebook, others might prefer MySpace.

Colleagues might be on LinkedIn and your clients or potential customers might be listed on Naymz.

Of course if you undertake any kind of a social media optimization program then you will almost certainly have memberships with dozens of different sites and if you manage several sites then… anyway, you get the picture.

A lot of social networking and not much hope of remembering all of your usernames and passwords with even less desire to log in to each and every one when you want to keep track of your progress or message a friend.

A social network aggregator could be the solution if this sounds like a problem you face.

Although there are a number of so called aggregators that enable you to view a timeline of your own activity and updates from your friends in the main social networks there are surprisingly few that enable you to perform other desirable and indeed necessary actions.

8Hands is one of a few that we’ve been able to find that shows aggregated feeds in a single timeline and enables you to update your status on all networks and even upload images and other media to multiple networks in one go. Definitely worth considering if you’re struggling to keep up with your social networking life.

This blog post is short, sweet, and accurate. One negative review really can do substantial damage to a business–he suggests that the reputation management industry can help.

First of all, before you do have any negative publicity make sure that you have a process in place. It is even better if you already have an online reputation management campaign in process because then it will make the rest of these steps easier. It will also make it harder for negative publicity to hurt you. Make sure that if you do have a campaign going, you know what your plan is if you do come under attack and work this out with the professionals before hand. One of the keys here to remember is that no matter how much experience you have had with traditional PR, most SEO and ORM professionals have been doing this for some time, and know how to work the internet.

Many people might scoff at that last sentence, but most individuals with considerable experience with online PR problems would agree.

There are many reasons that companies, organizations, and even individuals can be subject to negative press on the Internet. In some cases, the reviews might be warranted but even so the person or group that it relates to is highly unlikely to want these appearing at the top of search results or on the front pages of prominent websites. The first instinct of many people is to fight negative reviews whether through legal action or other means.

Before responding to poor online press you should consider the comment itself. Determine how visible it is and whether people that search for you or your company will realistically find it. Posting a response will often only serve to give the original review greater exposure and the extra comments that it elicits may even improve the position of the review.

Legal action, even if successful, can have a similar effect. Newspapers and magazines will often report on such action. Many decent publications have high profile websites and are used by news wires and other amalgamation services to produce their own content. Reports of intended, successful, or unsuccessful court action can lead to widely reported articles and pieces on the topic that will naturally appear very prominently in the search results.

Usually, the most effective solution to the emergence of poor online publicity, is to attempt to  counteract it and even hide it; eventually, through the use of effective online reputation management services, it is possible to consign these results to the lower levels of search results and replace them with positive or factual pieces instead.

Social Networking has had a transformative effect on businesses offering reputation management services. Unvarnished is a new social networking site that promises to have an even larger effect on the industry as is. Unvarnished allows anonymous comments to be made on personal profiles–profiles which may not even necessarily be created or run by the individuals themselves. This means that a disgruntled employee can go and create a profile for the employer who fired them and proceed to trash them online, on a website that is highly likely to show up in Google if it ever becomes popular enough.

The ability to abuse this technology and write scathing reviews about former bosses, ex-girlfriends, or anyone that looked at you funny is staggeringly high, while those wishing to post favorable reviews can already do so on LinkedIn, or any number of other websites without worrying about anonymity. And with no responsibility from the poster to be fair- or even honest- the dark side of this technology becomes glaringly apparent. If one person has 30 positive reviews, but one comes from a jilted ex, or grudge wielding former coworker stating that the person regularly stole from a company, that post would stay with the favorable reviews forever, with no way of removing, or even tempering it short of deleting the entire profile. With social networking being more and more relied on by potential employers, the consequences to bad reviews could be very, very real.

Let us hope this is not the first social networking site to do damage to people’s reputations online, but it is certainly the worst version thus far.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/new-website-allows-you-to-review-people/?news=123

The central tenet of Internet Reputation Management is putting forward a positive image of yourself. This often means using social networking sites like facebook or LinkedIn to put your best foot forward. Jennifer Abernathy is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Social Media Marketing and she was recently interviewed by FastCompany.com.

Corporate professionals have to be on LinkedIn, which I call the Cable Channel of Social Media. While you have to have complete profile and do a good job with presenting yourself, the new trend is to talk about your customers and prospects. For example, instead of talking about yourself, why don’t you do an open letter to your prospects? If you’re a CEO or other C-level business leader, you must be aware that customer service is a huge differentiator in a crowded field.

That is solid advice whether you are a CEO or an entry-level intern. The rest of the interview is well-worth reading and is chocked full of interesting advice from Ms. Abernathy.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1613223/interview-with-jennifer-abernethy-author-of-the-complete-idiot-s-guide-to-social-media-marke

TechCrunch can always be counted on to give some credible advice on the subject of international reputation management. They published an article called “Reputation is Dead” that has some salient points to make on the subject.

Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access.

This is certainly true–and increasingly so. However, the idea that reputation is dead is wrong, I think. As long as regular reputation management exists, international reputation management will exist.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/reputation-is-dead-its-time-to-overlook-our-indiscretions/

The article linked below is a stirring defense of anonymity on the Internet, thanks to Mariam Cook of the Guardian. Although many in the online defamation industry complain about the atmosphere that the guaranteed anonymity of the Internet has created, this article clearly demonstrates that we are complaining about what we see without considering what might become of the Internet, and reputations, without anonymity.

In our online panopticon where forum posts, Guardian comments and political blogs can all be found by employers via a simple Google search, what might be the result of forcing people to specify their offline identity? Would commenters – good, bad or rabid – take the time to stop by and debate an environment story, the Chilcot inquiry, or women’s place in the workplace if they thought their opinion was instantly traceable? Would they self-censor, keen to keep their online reputation free of political opinion. Would they just participate less?

My guess is that participation would simply decrease, and so would the vehemence of the participation. However, I see, and agree with, the general point of Ms. Cook’s article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/17/protecting-online-anonymity

Everywhere you go, your reputation follows you. Online, the reputation magnifies and can be distorted by people and forces. One of the best pieces of the article is where the author talks about the lack of thought that goes into peoples posting. The authors warning, at the end, is simple.

Don’t post anything your parents, your principal or boss, the police or predators or crooks can’t see. Take a second before you post it and think about what you’re saying and how it could be misinterpreted, how it could be abused. If you’re posting a picture, how’s your boss going to feel about the fact that you posted it when you were supposed to be home sick? And how are your kids going to feel about it? Even if you don’t have them now, you will someday probably. What damage could that one thing do? There are consequences for everything.

Protecting your privacy and your reputation is of incredible importance. It is easier to prevent reputation damage than to repair the damage after via reputation management services.

http://www.smartplanet.com/people/blog/pure-genius/protecting-your-privacy-and-reputation-online/2480/