Over time the importance and focus of these conversations will grow, as ultimately they potentially could have an impact on your search engine listings.

So tracking these conversations and responding to them will become part of the daily marketing mix that companies will need to adopt.

Seth Godin launched Brands In Public this week which is a service that tracks all the conversations on one page. This is one of the most sophisticated systems I have seen recently. Really usable and means you can keep track of those conversations across all the different sites.

What this actually demonstrates is that if key individuals such as Seth are setting up business around monitoring the conversations online, then online brand reputation (whether thats personal or a company brand) is a growing marketing. It is currently in it’s infancy but is growing at a rapid rate.

It reminds me a lot of when Google launched, and people who adopted the marketing channels early on and used the search engines wisely to grow their business, became market leaders.

Those brands who start thinking about online brand reputation management, embrace the channels and actually start using them to grow the brand awareness, will come out of this recession, stronger and with a competitive advantage which will bode them well for future success.

This isn’t just corporate brands but personal brand. For those figures who are in the public eye need to monitor who is saying what about them, but also opportunities where they can get involved in the conversations.

So what are you doing to track your personal or corporate online brand reputation? What are you doing to influence and grow it?