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The topic here is a lot broader than putting your own name in Google or another search engine of your choice and hitting "enter". It's about knowing what's being said about your business and what your own social media sites are saying about your business and what you are telling the world. The impetus for this discussion came two or three years ago from Joe Rotella, the chief technology officer for Delphia Consulting, a Columbus, Ohio-based firm that specializes in the sale and installation of payroll and human resources software. Rotella, who I have referred to as a one-man think tank, says people in business should perform a search on their names, and don't just settle for the first few pages, go deep and find out what's being said about you.

Rotella's example involved a client municipality that was complaining about an installation Delphia had performed. He followed up, found out what the problem was. Delphia fixed it and happier client stayed a client and spent more money. Or you can not bother with the search and have the client continue to complain.

Apply the same scrutiny to your business's social media sites. The old fashioned public relations advice is make sure the pages convey the image you want to convey. But in the old days, your prospects and clients couldn't scribble their opinions on your mailings and pass them on to others, well not easily.

Now they can and posts to Facebook or LinkedIn aren't necessarily going to be in the form of fan mail. I have "liked" a company's Facebook page simply because I wanted to post complaints that were hard to get to the right person. Or I wanted to see if others shared my complaint. Or I was just mad. At least I was not one of these people putting up "YourFirmSucks" pages on the Web. This does get back to the classic PR issue of how to deal when bad things are being said about your company's products or services. Similarly, determining whether the people who "like" your company are the kinds of people you are trying to reach is a classic marketing issue.

Or simply you need to know if your site has very few visitors; if very few people join your LinkedIn group, is there a problem? If they spend their time posting discussions about sports, what's going wrong?

There is another issue that affects Facebook more than Linkedin since Facebook is much more casual and the question is whether you should put business posts on a personal page? The practice ranges from never to always, depending on your list of friends. But it's clear that posts on personal pages can have a business benefit or they can quickly annoy a lot of people.

The one thing a business owner can't do is assume because the social media site has been set up that everything is going as it should. Well you can, but you might find your business's name is now e-mud.

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