The success of any internet reputation management campaign is how your brand, name, profession or company appears in search engine results page. However, there are changes in the primary search engine, Google, and the top social networking site Facebook that can put a wrinkle on your online reputation.

Google has introduced real-time results in their search engine result pages or SERPs wherein mentions of your brand or name in various top sites such as Twitter will immediately appear at the top of the search engine results. All the little tweets, whether they are praises or derogatory remarks, will be very visible to any generic user of the search engine. This is taking online reputation management into new heights as the battle now goes beyond Google’s top ten results.

And there’s another bomb from Facebook, with its new privacy settings, that will complicate things a little bit further for online reputation management. Your status updates will be displayed to everyone unless you opt-out, and the term “everyone” that Facebook uses here includes the major search engines. If a user doesn’t know how to “opt-out” from this and keep all his info private, and then everything appears in Google’s new real-time search – it can spell disaster to anyone’s online reputation if they are not too careful.

Don’t be ignorant with your Internet reputation. Know how to protect your reputation in Facebook, Google and who knows what comes next in the near future.