Knowing what is being said about your business on the internet is very important as positive things are great and good for your business and negative things can be very damaging.
Lets face it, just about everyone goes to the internet for their source of information and if they were just visiting your web site, then you could paint the picture about your business that you want everyone to see and know about you, and that would be all there is to it.
However, there are so many places on the internet for anyone to go and review your business, positive or negative. Blogging is now such a large part of the internet and has gained a great deal of popularity and credibility that a negative write up on your business can be very damaging and in the hands of the right blogger can go viral over the internet.
I use Google alerts to let me know whenever anything is written about the business I manage. You can set up these alerts here http://www.google.com/alerts and it seems to work pretty well, it even picks up my tweets from twitter. There are other sites that you can use, this just the one I use.
So far I have only encountered positive writings and they are great to share with our staff to help keep morale as high as possible. But if and when I encounter a negative one, I will be able to at least address it before it spins out of control and reaches to many people. Blog alerts can play an important part managing the business and I work way to hard to allow anything negative to go unaddressed.