In cyberspace, whether you’ve been a saint, sinner, or some combination of the two, your reputation sticks. Forever. Long after the real world has moved past its obsession with your high school foibles, tawdry affairs, or crooked deals, the Internet elephant never forgets.

I’ve lived it. A few years back I made a dumb business decision and it’s still there, haunting me each time I Google my name. Most of what was written was not true, but that hardly matters. It hurt me personally and professionally and still does to this day.

As we put more of ourselves out there on the Internet, we’re going to be hearing a lot about the growing science (or is it art?) of reputation management. Reputation management consists of two parts. First, you’ll want to track what people are saying about you (your company, your employees, your product, your children). Next, you’ll want to take the appropriate action if your online reputation is being sullied. That’s the tougher part.

Tracking Your Reputation

The first steps are the easiest. There are a number of programs that let you see what’s being said on the Internet by tracking a specific word—like your own name. A Google search will bring up your name, but to automate the process you can use Google News Alerts. Just enter your name, company name, or any other term you want to track in the news and if it comes up on the web you’ll receive an email. Lots of false positives and misses, but it’s really easy.

From there, tracking tools get more granular. If you blog you’ll want to monitor where your work or words show up on blogs. It’s advisable to register at a site like Technorati. They keep a sort of uber-list of blogs and can search for mentions of whatever it is that you’re tracking across thousands of blogs. If you want to track comments about your blogs you’ll use a different tool.

For the top 10 free tools to track stuff on the web, read this Mashable post.

If less choice is more, then stick to the five free tools discussed on the Personal Branding Blog.

And, if you want too much information about how you should be thinking about your reputation in cyberspace, you can read 100 tips from criminal justice.

Next, we’ll look at the hairier, thornier issue of what to do when bad things are said about good people (like you).