With school teachers, employers, and even people you meet randomly in the bar "Googling" you, online reputation management has never been more important. All it takes is a couple uploaded drunken pictures to your MySpace or Facebook to have them rank for your name (provided you aren’t John Smith) and ruin your reputation to everyone who happens to look.

Listen up students and professionals alike: Who is going to hire someone who has all 200 pictures of them in various stages of undress or drunkenness? Not me, that’s for sure. It seems all in good fun at the time but do you really want everyone you ever meet who has heard of “Googling” to know how hard you used to party?

It seems hard at the time to censor your friends from posting pictures of you, but you CAN un-tag yourself. Sure you may come across as a “buzzkill” - but when your future is on the line...

Your past escapades caught on camera can come back to haunt you, just ask billionaire co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin. On the first page of results in Google Images for "sergey brin" is this beauty of a photo:

My prediction in the next few years we will see a boom of “Online Reputation Managers” springing up. Sadly not all of them will be any good and some will take advantage of people who know less about the web.

My best advice would be to protect yourself while you can... And the next time you are thinking about posting that picture of you smoking and drinking... reconsider - or at least use an alias.

And don't just assume that because your photos are marked "Private" you're safe. Your friends still have access to these photos and they can leak your photos to public sites. And sites like Facebook aren't as secure as you might think, when it comes to private photos.

Be careful when converting your company name / brand name into an (available) domain name; it can have embarrassing repercussions.

I was reminded of this fact recently when seeing an email in my inbox that was sent to multiple recipients, including myself. One of the recipients was someone at arsecommerce.com. This domain name may appear rather ordinary to us Americans. But to those who speak "the Queen's English" - including those in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand - I bet they get a chuckle when they see it. I can imagine them thinking to themselves "Is this the company that put the "arse" in commerce?". The company is ARS Ecommerce, not Arse Commerce.

Company names that work well in one context may not work so well in another. I remember a classic example of this from a hilarious piece in Business 2.0 magazine (circa 2001) called "Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History". Here's the money quote:

In October 1998, an e-commerce software vendor launches with the name Accompany, which, when said aloud, sounds exactly like "a company." As in "Hi, I'm calling from Accompany." "Which company?" "Accompany." And so forth. It changes its name to MobShop in March 2000.

In my post on the News.com blog titled "Eleven steps to buying a domain name that doesn't suck, I give another classic example of a domain name faux pas: therapistfinder.com. No, it's a site for finding therapists, not rapists.

You also have to consider whether your choice of domain name will get you inadvertently blocked by email firewalls or the search engines' adult filters.

Take for example this parts store - partsexpress.com - hyphenating the two words would have been a good idea. Ditto for whorepresents.com, an agency that represents celebrities.

Here are a few other examples of domain names gone horribly wrong:

• cumstore.co.uk for Cumbria Storage Systems, Ltd.
• choosespain.com to travel in Spain, pain-free!
• mammotherection.com deals with modern architecture and engineering
• cummingfirst.com is for a church in Cumming, Georgia

While these are pretty funny (and/or disturbing, depending upon your point-of-view), these are reputation management nightmares. Sadly, they were all preventable -- usually with merely a well-placed hyphen or change in keywords. NYCanal.com could have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment by choosing ny-canal.com or newyorkcanal.com instead.

Reputation monitoring and management have become hot topics and will only continue to grow. These are becoming important areas for all businesses, large and small, to focus on as more and more people turn to the Web to communicate through blogs, their own Web sites, as well as the ever-growing opportunities for online consumer reviews and ratings.

The above quote was written in a CNet: Searchlight post about DIY Reputation Management. In that post, I take an in-depth look at this popular topic for businesses and professionals, and offer a ton of tips like: places to monitor your online reputation, what to do, what not to do, and some friendly reminders. I'd like to share with you one of my tips: set up Google and Yahoo! alerts for keywords, your brand name, or other things that relate to your reputation. By doing so, you can easily keep up with what kinds of content the search engines are serving up.