The Internet has become an increasingly great resource for consumers over the years. Once upon a time, if a person wanted to know the dirt on a business, they got a subscription to Consumer Reports. Now, consumers don’t have to wait for their subscription to come in. They just log in and find reviews. Online reputation management is an essential anymore for any company to succeed.

You can’t satisfy everyone, that’s just a simple fact. However, the Internet has become a virtual medium where praise and condemnation occur at the speed of light. Reviews are viral, quickly spread. One review could be seen by thousands of people in a day. You should be armed with the tools of reputation management in response to this.

If you get a bad review, naturally you will want to address it or bury it. Part of the art of reputation management online is knowing when to take which approach. After all, a disgruntled customer may be better taken care of by talking out an issue, whereas a competitor posting a bad review would be better off buried in Google.

If you start reputation management before you launch your product, you’re better off. If you can think of any reason you would get negative reviews, the time is now to take care of them. It’s always better to spend a little extra time and money now than losing more time, money and business later. Countering negative campaigns is an expensive business in terms of those resources.

Of course, you can’t expect that you will anticipate every problem that comes along. There will probably be negative reviews to deal with. As I said before, knowing how to take care of negative reviews in the right way is part of the art of reputation management. Interacting with the reviewer and burying them each has its pros and cons. The trick is figuring out which one to use.

First of all, you should determine whether this is an honest complaint or not. If you are made aware that the complaint is an actual problem, you should interact with the reviewer. In fact, unless you’re absolutely sure that it’s a competitors smear campaign, you should lead with this approach.

When you interact, you come off as being receptive to your customers. It makes you look like a good guy, basically. It can also prevent future and more extreme problems of this nature. Of course, the issue will stay on the front page, so you had better make yourself look really good in the interaction.

If what’s being said in the review is completely bogus, it might be time to take the kid gloves off. Before anything, you should contact the owners of the Web service. Talk to your lawyer, present your case to the site’s owner, and suggest that they remove the comment.

If that doesn’t work, it’s really time to play hardball. Court cases are too time consuming for reputation management. The comment will have to be taken off of the Google first page. Now is the time to talk to a firm that can handle reputation management. If you can get enough Web pages that outrank that one, they’re sunk.