I just read an article in the New York Times reporting that the popular Yelp.com website has made a major change to its policies. In case you're not familiar with Yelp, it's a website where anyone can write reviews of restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, dry cleaners, CPAs, fish markets, and most any other kind of business you can imagine. You can even write reviews of local places of interest, such as museums, parks, and beaches. I've been a BIG fan of Yelp for a couple of years now, and I rely heavily on the Yelp app on my iPhone when I'm looking for a great place to eat in an unfamiliar town. What's changing with Yelp's policies is that starting last week, the company now allows businesses to respond to negative comments left about them by reviewers. And believe me, reviewers can sometimes leave comments that are both brutal -- and untrue.

Consider this example. I have a friend of many years who owns a successful restaurant here in town. He's worked really hard to build his business, and he's invested everything he's got in it. Unfortunately, about a year ago, several Yelp reviewers decided to gang up on his restaurant and write a series of bad reviews. And not just bad reviews, but REALLY bad reviews.

Just one problem: they weren't true.

My friend doesn't know why his restaurant was singled out. Perhaps his bartender cut off someone's flow of alcohol before they liked, or maybe a waitress rebuffed someone's flirting. Whatever the reason, the restaurant suffered direct damage -- not only to its reputation, but to its bottom line. And until Yelp made this change to its policies, there was nothing my friend could do to directly respond to the bad reviews.

Which brings up this question: How's your cyber rep? Do you know what people are saying about your business online -- both good and bad? Are you familiar with all the major social networking sites where people talk about your kind of business? Are you an active participant, a passive observer, or completely out of the loop? I have personally seen the reps of several good businesses tarnished in the blink of an eye -- sometimes irreversibly -- by negative comments made by people posting in online forums.

To avoid this happening to your business, at minimum you should be monitoring sites where people are talking about your business, and keeping an eye on your cyber rep. Better yet, you should be aggressively correcting the record when someone posts negative information about your business that isn't true. And if the negative information just happens to be true, then you should go out of your way to correct the problem and to turn your disgruntled customer into a happy customer.

Remember: the reputation you save may be your own.