The Internet simply has different rules from the offline world about handling malicious attacks. Under the guise of anonymity, people simply act differently online than they do in the real world. This can have real consequences for a business on the receiving end of a flame post or malicious series of attacks from an irate web user that knows what he or she is doing.
First of all, businesses should know that comments can come from anywhere, and may or may not be based in fact. Therefore, trying to logically address the situation online will usually only backfire.
This will only further spark the flame, as the irate party now knows that they have the attention of the business. If a business is on the receiving end of behavior such as this, that business should take the conversation private as soon as possible, and never address the remarks on the same forum as the flamer.
Also, a business may find itself in the middle of an unsavory situation that it had absolutely nothing to do with. However, association with unsavory agents can still affect the online reputation of a business. If nothing else, a business should set up an alert to be notified by the search engines whenever its name is used online.
Real time search, recently announced by Google, also means new pitfalls for the business world. People being able to search for results in real time and in social media means that monitoring what is said about a business online, also in real time, is especially important.
A business should also make sure to “grab” all of the instances of its name online, including a URL of the business with its name in it, URLs with different suffixes, vanity URLs on the major social media sites, local listings on the search engines, etc. This also has positive implications for search engine results, as the more pages that are kept active, the more the search engines will rank those pages highly within their results. This also helps to push down any negative results that may pop up in reference to a business, so the time spent to create and maintain these profiles is well worth it.
Below are further resources pertaining to protecting the online reputation of a business.