The rise of social media has quite a lot to do with the damaging of the online reputation. Whether it is a business or an individual, social networking allows individuals to damage online reputations pretty easily.

The use of social media has skyrocketed, according to surveys linked in this article. They claim social media is up 230% since 2007, a pretty amazing figure.

The love affair between Internet-connected Americans and social networks continues, with two-thirds claiming to visit sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, up about 230% from the 20% penetration in 2007, and 43% are visiting these sites more than once a day, according to a new report by Experian Simmons.Multiple visits are up 28% compared with last year, the Simmons New Media study determined.

“The rise of social networking tracks closely with that of Facebook. As of April 26, 2010, 46% of the U.S. online adult population reported having visited Facebook in the past 30 days,” said the report.

People primarily logon to stay in touch with friends, followed by for fun and to communicate with family, according to the study. Career- and job-related reasons were low on the list: 19% said they used the sites to keep in touch with professional contacts; 9% wanted to make new professional contacts; 6% sought professional development; and 5% said it was part of their job, the report found.

If the rise of social media continues, it will reshape how industry professionals handle online reputation problems.

Mention the word microblogging to most Internet users and the majority of them will throw the word Twitter back at you. It is without doubt the largest and most populous of all the microblogging platforms on the Internet but it isn’t the only one out there and the nature of microblogging is such that even the busier marketer or business owner should be able to dedicate some time to creating such short posts in order to add to a number of these platforms.

FriendFeed is another microblogging platform although rather than relying on a simple interface and offering users a reasonably simple and manageable method of updating their account with short posts, FriendFeed has definitely plumped for the more information laden approach; some of the more sceptical among us may consider it information overload but it does offer the unique benefit of being able tointegrate with various other social networking and social media sites such as Facebook but also including Twitter and many others.

You can change the desing layout of your home page and display, and you can add text, audio, and even visual posts to your timeline. As with other social networks, you can of course add friends and other connections and then use the network in order to develop new connections.

Marketers need to be aware that outbound links are nofollow but you can generate new sources of traffic and you can develop a new profile that includes your own name and your company name to assist in online reputation management.

Yahoo just released a survey concerning Internet safety that is really quite interesting. The survey is being released in conjunction with Internet Safety Month, which is in June. The survey made use of 2,003 respondents who were questioned in April, 2010.

One issue to which they did not show much attention was online reputation management. This is an integral part of Internet safety. Predators online will often communicate with a minor and then spend hours looking for pictures, addresses, and additional information about those minors. If that information is easily found on a search engine, like Google, it is far more likely that predators are going to find it.