B. L. Ochman brought up an interesting point this morning: who is monitoring your company’s online reputation over the weekend? Plenty of executives and PR professionals have returned to work on Monday to find a snowballing issue covered in blogs and forums all over the Web. With two and a half days of unhindered momentum, it’s a daunting task to respond and diffuse a problematic situation on Monday morning.

Ochman mentions that as long as someone is monitoring over the weekend, a simple phone call can be made to those in charge of responding to negative press. Sure, that means that your online PR person would essentially be “on call”, but working out on call pay rates and compensation shouldn’t be too difficult as long as you maintain the mentality of rewarding your people for protecting the company.

You may also find that you’d rather not have an employee on call (or perhaps such an employee does not exist). In that case, hiring an agency or consultant to handle all or some of your reputation management is a necessary move. When your company responds immediately to a crisis and diffuses the potential nightmare, you’ll know how valuable the service is. Millions of dollars of made and lost because of the press. Don’t be caught unaware.

As a professional reputation manager, I cannot stress the importance of monitoring your reputation seven days a week, weekends included. Whether you do it in-house or through a consultant, you’ll be hard pressed to find a wiser spend. Whether it’s for an entire corporation or an individual, the results are invaluable.