Over the last week I've been actively hunting out a Designer and Programmer skilled with Wordpress.  I've posted on the Wordpress forums, Created a profile on a freelance site and posted the job details, found several blogs based around Wordpress tutorials and sent direct messages to the blog owners and have received numerous contacts from those blog owners pointing me in the right direction.

Needless to say I've been busy trying to get everything taken care of and in my communication efforts I discovered the importance of Social Media Reputation Management on a whole new level that I thought would be highly important for Realtor's using Social Media such as Active Rain, Twitter, Facebook and so on to understand.

Many of us have LinkedIn which is a great place to send potential customers for testimonials, credentials and your resume.  Fantastic site that I'd encourage everyone to jump on board with.

However, while you are directing people to your LinkedIn profile where everything smells like roses, some consumers will be looking for you in other places on the World Wide Web.

Here are just a few examples of negative things I've found online and how while researching some of these providers:

Google Search: I searched on guys name and city and found out he is a Webmaster for a local website.  The website wasn't all that attractive and there were some pretty simple HTML mistakes that could be easily avoided.  I then found out that he and his buddy have started a music label from another website.  Turns out this service provider shared his life story on this site and all the parties, drugs, jail and women.  While he has made a great effort to straighten up, I simply don't think I can trust someone with only a few months of 'doing good' under his belt.

Twitter: Someone suggested I follow someone on Twitter and ask them for help.  Before I got a chance to followed them I checked out their website which was highly professional and awesome looking; even built on Wordpress.  However I took a quick look at their Twitter timeline and in more than one occasion I seen this person seriously trash talking and complaining about Customers.  Now, he didn't mention any names but the hostility and negativity coming from him made me think he probably isn't the best person for the job.

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I'm just saying that if you use Twitter, post comments on others blogs and so on then it might be a good idea to consider, "Hey, what if a customer reads this?".  For an additional viewpoint and thoughts on the topic check out a friends post on Reputation Management.  He wrote it awhile back now but it brings a unique perspective none the less.