News, views and reviews now travel at incredible velocity online. This video reviews how social news can have a profound effect on anyone because the public has already made up its mind on the issue before you’ve even responded to it.

Think England football captain John Terry, the claimed cyber-lynching of a US Presidential candidate, the BlackBerry outage?

The flip-side is that people and companies can communicate directly with their customers and potential customers. Ramona Mehta at Mishcon de Reya, Louis Gray now Product Marketing at Google+ and Richard Dennys at Qype share some thoughts on the way to mitigate “social media risk”. There are four ways, specifically, that you can plan to manage online reputation and mitigate risk.

Some of the vocab is now commonplace: Retweet, Like, Favourite, Share, Thumbs Up, +1, Embed

What is for sure is you must make online reputation management an integral part of your business, otherwise there could be another internet lynching on the cards.