In today’s online gusher of consumer opinion and dialogue, reviews and rumors come in little spurts and splashes on a variety of different websites, blogs and even comments to those blogs. There’s Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Citysearch and a vast sea of other websites to monitor and manage. The web is the modern day comment card—the only difference being that it’s publicly visible to millions.

So, it’s important for all businesses to understand what people are saying, spot customer trends, see how they stack up against their competition and check to see if information, such as directory listings, is accurate and updated. While large corporations typically employ a team of communications specialists to do this monitoring, small- to medium-size businesses are usually left to their own devices. As a result, owners or managers wind up spending either a lot of time monitoring online comments, or even worse, no time at all.

However, online reputation management doesn’t have to be as complex as many people make it out to be. Realistically, there are four easy steps that all companies should take:

• Update and/or correct your online listings to ensure that customers (and potential customers) can find you
• Listen to what your customers are saying about you online
• Engage with your customers in these online communities
• Incorporate customer feedback into your decision-making to improve your business

“Our online reputation is critical to our business,” said Steve Rosen, co-founder of Seattle restaurant chain, Blue C Sushi. “There are really only two factors that go into someone’s decision-making when choosing a restaurant like ours—they either hear about it from a friend or they check online.”

So what’s a business owner to do if a negative review does pop up?

Fortunately, there are now tools that easily uncover what is being said about a business, organizing commentary by subject or sentiment, and laying out ways a business can make improvements or promote praise.

It’s called online reputation management, and it’s one of the most important new strategies in marketing. Why? Because, according to Opus Research, 35 percent of small businesses claim to have received new customers from positive reviews. And online customer reviews influence the purchase decisions of 84 percent of consumers, according to the Opinion Research Corporation.

The tools are available, and the time is now. BIA/Kelsey expects the email, reputation and presence management (ERPM) category to grow from $460 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. Additionally, the number of SMBs using ERPM will increase from approximately 500,000 to nearly 4 million during the forecast period.

Given the hundreds of different sites on which a review could appear, reputation management tools can be a smart investment for businesses, especially for those in the service industry where reviews and the websites that not only welcome, but relish, criticism could cause serious damage. Meanwhile, being able to see what is working and making customers happy is important, too. Still, to repeat the American pop culture adage, knowing is only half the battle.

Take it from Rosen: “The whole idea of reputation management is not just about reading reviews. It’s about actually doing something about it.”

Through online reputation management, business owners can turn what initially seems like a negative—a bad review—into a positive by taking the customer feedback and using it to better their business.

Do your customers think you’re understaffed during busy happy hours? Bring in another server. Is someone unhappy with your variety of merchandise? Consider expanding your selection. Knowing what your customers want is sometimes half the battle. But once you do, more times than not the fix is a fairly easy one.

This is the audience of the future. And 2010 may just be the year for advertisers to tip the scale in reaching it. The technology powerhouses (i.e. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Apple) are finally diving into mobile advertising in a huge way, recognizing the approach of critical mass.

None of this is new. The market has been predicting that mobile will explode for years. Somehow, it hasn’t. Not yet, anyway. But that is all about to change—partly because of the dissolution of advertising in traditional media, but mostly because consumers are beginning to demand it.

The “smart” in smart phones is finally proving itself. And the businesses that have the most to gain from this newfound demand will be local, small business advertisers offering what consumers want to buy right now. In our experience, restaurant takeout, florists or home/consumer services such as carpet cleaning, self storage or auto repair are good examples of business categories that are particularly well suited for mobile campaigns.

An improving economy is bringing about a resurgence of small businesses—make that local businesses. Businesses with traditionally shallow advertising pockets, but all the more need for exposure.

High conversion rates, low cost and the ability to target highly local audiences will push mobile advertising into the spotlight this year. We have experimented with a number of mobile ad offerings and while we can’t give out all the secrets, we can say that we’ve had significant success with mobile search and increasing click-to-call ratios with mobile landing page optimization. Some best practices around succeeding with mobile include building campaign architectures and keywords specifically for the mobile user. This may include shorter keyword phrases, acronyms and even slang terms. Marketers should also consider the landing page for mobile campaigns – while iPhones and Droid phones are able to view full HTML pages, at least 85 percent of the market (according to a 2009 comScore study) still use other types of phones where mobile-friendly landing pages are a must for effective viewing.

A recent New York Times article made similar points, noting a prediction from Juniper Research that mobile ad spending worldwide will more than quadruple, to $6 billion, by 2014. Analyst Windsor Holden goes on to say that, while everyone has been hoping for the past five years that mobile advertising will take off, this will actually be the year it finally gets significant traction.

The first rule of business: give customers what they want when they want it. For example, a busy working mom who needs to send a bouquet can easily use her mobile device to find a florist. But her smart phone might go beyond mere directory search to display geo-targeted ads that only show results near her location, and then present a local florist’s phone number that she only has to tap or click to call.

Highly specific targeting, including leveraging aggregated consumer-related information, will also aid in the advent of mass mobile advertising. Much like paid-search ads, that local florist’s ad might appear on the working mom’s smart phone reminding her of a special occasion. Additionally, seeing the florist’s ad on a smart phone allows the working mom to easily store the business’ name and number for future reference, increasing the likelihood of repeat business.

Not only are the conversion rates generally high with mobile ads, the cost of entry is incredibly low compared to traditional local advertising. Mobile advertising campaigns are comparatively easy to set up as well. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that the time for taking full advantage of mobile ad inventory is now, while the costs are artificially low as a result of many advertisers still spending their budgets on PC ads. According to eMarketer, only 1 percent of total U.S. advertising spend is directed towards mobile. Of that 1 percent, the bulk is used for SMS advertising, which generally is harder to make work for local.

With the power of search at their fingertips, consumers have become increasingly dependent on information on the go. Advertisers can capitalize on this trend and offer their potential customers service with convenience via mobile advertising.