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Of all the things that people say about you on the Web, what is acceptable to you? What is not acceptable? You cannot control what other people say about you but you may want to know what impact their comments are having on your reputation.

When Visible Technologies launched TruReputation last week we also launched TruReputation Score — a free tool for scoring sentiment.

At least one person questioned the value of self-grading. To me the value is self-evident but I’ve been involved in online reputation management for many years. The concept is still new to many people.

The point of the self-grading your online reputation is that only you know where your comfort level lies. Only you know what you like to see other people say about yourself. Only you know what you don’t like having said about you. We do have sophisticated sentiment grading analysis tools that learn how to analyze stuff — that’s expensive technology that won’t be offered for free this year.

You can subscribe to search engine alerts and see random new content that appears in your name space but the alert tools don’t tell you whether the content is favorable, unfavorable, or unrelated to your reputation. Nor do they tell you how visible that content is.

The whole point of TruReputation Score is to give you a snapshot analysis of what people will find in the top search results for your name or brand and to let you see at a glance (after you have scored it) how favorable or unfavorable that content is. The higher your score is, the more favorable your reputation results are.

Some people flood the search results with social media profiles, micro sites, and other content they have created for themselves. That’s not building a reputation. That’s creating a reputation shield (or a marketing message, which is acceptable in itself). Your reputation is measured by what other people say about you. If you want to get an accurate TruReputation Score, you should grade your own content neutral unless you allow other people to comment on those pages.

We released the TruReputation Score tool to help educate people about sentiment because it’s important to know that when it comes to understanding your online reputation, sentiment is more valuable than the mere existence of content. A hostile Web page that ranks 50th for your name is nowhere near as likely to influence what people think about you as a glowing testimonial that ranks 5th.

TruReputation Score is the mirror you use to see how others see you. You have to be careful in how you use it, though. You can deceive yourself into thinking you have a great reputation. But the tool is also flexible enough that you can use it to see how far your marketing message reaches into the search results. There is plenty more to say on that score, but I’ll leave that for another day.