"Privacy" is an impossible ideal in the age of the Internet. Everyone is tracked everywhere, and Google is well-known for producing the most embarrassing of results upon searching for one's own online footprint.

For small businesses as well as for individuals, maintaining one's "brand" is absolutely essential to succeed. Slander - even if false - or bad reviews can damage business for years to come, if not forever. Any issues regarding public image that crop up need to be nipped in the bud, before they blossom into a giant slanging match that really has no resolution.

In order to nip issues in the bud, they must first be FOUND while in their nascent state. Google's Alerts can help here to some degree, but a much greater degree of sophistication is required to fulfill the needs of a business organization.

This is where reputation monitoring tools come in handy.

Apart from preventing such public fiascos, reputation monitoring is extremely useful to help businesses raise their public image and build rapport with a responsive section of the audience. Using features such as location data and audience charting, businesses can find out where to target their next sales campaign, even before it begins.

Sometimes, it is wise to tap into the thoughts of one's prospective clientele even before you meet them. While creating polls to know the thoughts of people on a particular subject is a tried-and-tested method, it comes with the huge disadvantage of revealing your ideas to them. To retain the element of surprise in a marketing campaign, it is best to feel the pulse of the crowd through targeted searches - the greater customizability the better.

Once an online marketing campaign has been launched, it is necessary to monitor its success. This is especially true for direct marketing campaigns such as email or video marketing, where success rates are often low and people tend not to talk about them unless it is to complain about the "spamminess" of the mails. By keeping a close watch on how an email marketing campaign is received, a business can modify the campaign with time and refine it to suit the audience better.

Some things have no substitute, and one of them is time. If a marketing campaign can hit while the iron is hot, it is exponentially more likely to succeed than the same campaign, run at the wrong time. This is especially true given the microscopic attention span of the public today.

For example, an ad depicting a Nobel Prize would have run beautifully back in October 2009. Can you remember why? If you still can, congratulations! At the time of writing, it's been just three months since President Obama was awarded the Nobel.

On a vast space like the Internet, using niche tools to complete your regular tasks - link building, bookmarking, reputation monitoring etc. - can save several hours in a day. Now, rather than having to run a Google Alert for every phrase you want to track, you can just set up a custom filter, and concentrate on improving your PR as the results keep entering your inbox.