What people are saying about you happens now in 60-second cycles.  What can you do to influence it?

The ability for Google and Bing to now show an angry tweet or Facebook comment that a customer posted minutes ago can rank higher on search engines than your company’s Web site. This is a game-changer for all who want to thrive in the emerging Conversation Economy.

Take the Tiger Woods Test: Even though it’s been nearly two months since the story broke, his online reputation and sentiment is bogeying in real-time. The adjacent screenshot lists posts and comments made within a 20-second time span — 20. They range from claims of steroid use and total conquests to pleas of forgiveness.

This is an extreme example. Yet, only weeks ago he was regarded as one of the most respected public figures on the planet and the biggest human brand in history, worth more than $1 billion in marketing dollars.

Celebrities have a lot of laundry aired out regularly, but in this new normal, you may soon have your share of “transgressions” aired on the Internet.

There are free as well as paid tools online that measure sentiment and what you and others are saying.  Go to www.SocialMention.com and give it a try. A key component of reputation is your "Sentiment Score" — the measure of positive, neutral and negative conversations about you.  To see this in action, go to www.TweetFeel.com, a fun Twitter tool to watch sentiment in real time about any topic, person or company. Another site, www.NewsSift.com, is better for business.

Why does reputation matter now more than ever? As social technologies continue to disrupt the status quo and we move from producer-controlled messaging to consumer-truth finding, our business models need disruptive overhauls. Case in point: I went to a new restaurant recently and asked the owner what he thought about www.yelp.com.  After he finished cursing me and anyone who’s ever used Yelp, I realized he was stuck in old-business-model thinking.  He’s been receiving poor reviews based on his prices and is choosing to ignore his real-time negative reputation.

Instead, he could be engaging those users, learning from them and encouraging his raving fans to post positive reviews to combat the negative.

We need a new model, one that can adapt to real-time reputation issues and much more. That new model is “Social Enterprise.”

In future articles, I’ll share how to become a social enterprise.

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What Can You Start Doing?

1. Gather your personal tools.

• Fortitude. This is not easy.  Becoming cyber savvy takes discipline and time.
• Smart Phone. iPhone, Blackberry, Nexus One or Droid.
• Browser.  FireFox is the best because of the powerful plug-ins.
• Twitter account. Use www.TweetDeck.com for greater ease.

2. Get strategic. Conduct a Social Enterprise Assessment of your company.  What is your SEQ — Social Enterprise Quotient? Come back in February to download your free SEQ.

3. Review your current business model. Incorporate a new communication strategy internally and externally into the new model.  Also, include a way to find and sustain raving fans to propel your message. Revisit your companies compelling story and improve and condense it to a one-minute video.

4. Become a blog reader. Being able to gather and read a lot of information quickly is key to success. (Google Reader is a great tool for this at www.google.com/reader.)

5. Start tracking your reputation and the reputation of others. There are hundreds of tools available.  You only need a few:

• www.google.com/alerts (basic alerts)
• www.newssift.com (great business tool)
• socialmention.com (holistic listening tool)
• www.ubervu.com (general listening tool)
• www.blogpulse.com (blog specific)
• www.peoplebrowsr.com (paid service that’s well worth the $5 a month)
• www.twendz.com (measures Twitter Trends)
• www.twitalyzer.com (Twitter specific)

Editor’s note: Mark A. Carbone is First Monday’s resident “Social Technology Strategist.”  Follow him on Twitter @MarkACarbone for the latest or email mark@marksnewnormal.com.

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