To anyone paying attention, it is quite clear that businesses have to be a lot more engaged these days in managing their reputations online.  Yet I’m still amazed at the number of people who have still failed to grasp this fact.

The world has already changed. You have a problem with a company’s customer service, you’re not limited to bad-mouthing them to a couple of friends anymore, you can blog about it, Twitter, put up a rant on YouTube, etc, etc and have your complaint heard by millions. At little or no cost to you at all.

Some people are catching on, and unsurprisingly, those in high-tech industries are quick to adapt. Here’s an example I loved this week, showing with humor how to turn the tide from negative to positive:

A couple of years ago, games maker EA Sports released the 2007 version of the popular Madden Football game. It contained a bug which caused your quarterback to throw the ball backwards. Not a big deal, but pretty funny – one fan’s video has had over 300,000 views on YouTube since he put it up.

Then this week, another game from EA Sports, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 had a similar bug. With a certain shot you could make Tiger walk on water and play the ball from a floating spot. Again, a fan video generated over 250,000 views.

This time though, EA Sports was on the ball (so to speak). They responded with their own video, featuring the real Woods ‘really’ walking on water to play the shot from the game:

At the time of writing, this has had just shy of a million views. In a week. That is an enormous amount of free publicity, and an even better example of how to manage your online reputation.