The most recent findings from the Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and comScore Media Metrix estimates 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day. Furthermore, they report in two surveys of American adults conducted between January 13 and March 21 that involved 2,871 Internet users, that 9% of Internet users now say they have created blogs and 25% of Internet users say they read blogs. Another way to render these numbers is to note that 6% of the entire U.S. adult population (Internet users and non-users alike) have created blogs. That’s one out of every 20 people. And 16% of all U.S. adults (or one in six people) are blog readers which is approximately 20% of the size of the newspaper-reading population.
Reporters, consumers, clients, investors and employees are learning about your organization every day when they search the Internet. Tracking, measuring and managing your company's online reputation (or your competitor's) is becoming increasingly important. Your company's reputation is its most important asset, not being immediately aware of a negative or erroneous article, blog post or forum comments can begin to quickly and significantly errode that asset. One nasty rumor that circulates freely on the Internet can have a lasting and damaging effect on your company's reputation, image, brands and public relations efforts. An article entitled "The blog in the corporate machine", published on February 9th, 2006 in The Economist, states:
The spread of “social media” across the internet—such as online discussion groups, e-mailing lists and blogs—has brought forth a new breed of brand assassin, who can materialise from nowhere and savage a firm's reputation. Often the assault is warranted; sometimes it is not. But accuracy is not necessarily the issue. One of the main reasons that executives find bloggers so very challenging is because, unlike other “stakeholders”, they rarely belong to well-organised groups. That makes them harder to identify, appease and control.
Monitoring thousands of news sites, millions of Web logs (blogs), message boards and user groups can be a daunting and time consuming task, however today's content discovery and mining technologies can help your company track, react to and counteract damaging rumors and issues that exist and thrive in blogs and elswhere the Internet. But doing so requires a commitment that stretches from the CSR department to the executive suite.
Corporate marketing and PR departments must begin to augment their current interactive strategies with a Consumer Generated Media (CGM) strategy that focuses on anticipation, prevention, management and education.

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