Your online reputation can make or break your business. Just like profit margins, what people say about your company online is important to its survival. Every day, people go online to write reviews or read reviews on sites like Yelp, Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor and Facebook. Small and medium-sized businesses rely heavily on word of mouth to get new customers or increase sales, so building an online reputation can have BIG consequences. That's why more and more businesses are turning to agencies and third party service providers for reputation management.

Today's guest is Brendan King, CEO of VendAsta, a software development company that helps small businesses monitor, manage and build their online reputations. VendAsta offers their reputation management platform through a white labeled Business Center and APIs, but as Brendan points out in our conversation, reputation management is more than just monitoring what customers are saying about you in reviews, social media or any other online source. It is about managing that information and building your digital presence to strengthen your brand.

Listen in as Brendan explains exactly what online reputation management means and how you can become an active part of the conversation your customers are having about your business.

Here's the full transcript:

CHARLES MCKEEVER: All right.

Welcome back to Open Source Marketer.

I’m your host, Charles McKeever, and today’s topic is online reputation management – how small and mid-sized businesses can manage their online reputations in an ever-changing digital world.

Joining me today to discuss the topic is VendAsta CEO, Brendan King.

Brendan and his management team have built a family of over 60 professionals that help businesses increase profits using reputation management. They’ve been at it since 2008.

Brendan, thanks for joining us today, man.

BRENDAN KING: Thanks. Thanks, Charles. Thanks for having me on the show.

CHARLES: I really appreciate you spending time. I know you’re traveling and you’re in your hotel room there. You’re doing this for us on the fly so I really appreciate it. I know we’re going to get some great information from you.

I think it’s fair to say that what people are saying online has a real impact on what businesses are doing offline. I mean, we’ve seen clear examples of this with the recent online buzz about the iPhone 6 Plus and all that’s caused. It even caused Apple to open up their testing facilities to show how they test their products. So, you know, whether it’s Yelp or TripAdvisor or Facebook, you know, word of mouth does carry a lot of weight.

But, before we get too far into that topic though, I want to hear from you what your definition of reputation management is.

BRENDAN: Sure, and you know that’s funny. There’s a lot of different people talking about reputation management in different ways. It’s not trying to scam the system or hide your identity online or change the results of how you run your business so that people can’t find bad reviews. Reputation management is really nothing different than what every small and medium business has always done all along. It’s just that the place that it’s done, the how is not different. It’s where and how that it’s done that’s actually changed.

In the past, people would come into a small business and the business owner would protect his reputation and it would travel by word of mouth. Now, the rate of change has completely changed. Consumers are empowered. Sites like Yelp or any other review site – Google Plus – have really enabled consumers to have a voice in what they think about a business, a business’ reputation. So, brand is really no longer what you say it is; it’s what your customers say it is. So, you really have to protect that brand and you have to work hard to perpetuate it because it will change and, like I said, in the old days, what could someone do? Take out an ad about the bad service