Andy Beal of Fortune Interactive has written a great piece on reputation management over at Marketing Pilgrim that is definitely worth a read if you are at all concerned about your brand.

Let’s face it, if you are out there at all, people are talking about you. The question is are they speaking well of you, creating buzz for your products and/or services or are they criticizing you?

Andy points out the obvious, that it can take months, even years to build a good brand. It can also take a lot of money. It is something that should be held dear and precious. At the very same time your brand can be easily tarnished by someone who is upset with you.

Andy paints the following scenarios:

“A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious.

It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.

A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency.

It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.

A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world.

It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.”

He then goes on to talk about how and what to track with regards to your reputation and provides some tips on what you might do if someone is taking shots at your reputation on the Internet.