Does your company have a website? A presence on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn? If your answer is no, you’re not alone. More than 90 percent of NOWRA members don’t list a website in our database, and more than 20 percent don’t even provide an email address.

Every company has to decide whether being online is worth the time and investment it involves, but one thing no company should do is ignore the impact of the online world on a business. Whatever your views on the value of being online, here are a few things to consider:

If you’re not online, you don’t exist – at least to some potential customers. There is a reason Google has become a verb. For large numbers of people, Google is the number one source of information. When they look for a septic system contractor in your area, and don’t see a website for you, but they do see one from a competitor, chances are they won’t even consider your company – and you won’t even know it.

Websites nowadays are easy to build. Wordpress.com offers free websites to anyone, and they provide lots of easy point-and-click widgets to make building a site a snap. Other websites, like GoDaddy, Homestead and VistaPrint offer even easier tools for building a website and cost less than $10 per month. Even if your efforts only bring in one or two customers, your investment of time can pay dividends.

If you don’t want to build a website, consider putting your company on Facebook, which has nearly a billion users worldwide. Many people use Facebook to learn more about companies they are considering. Creating a fan page or a group page costs no money, yet it gives you a presence online, helping you connect with customers and allowing new people to find you.

While the details for doing this are beyond the scope of this column, if you go to Facebook and type in the word “septic,” you will see how many onsite industry professionals are already there. Look at some of those pages and you will quickly get ideas about how you can make this social media platform work for you.

Even if you don’t have a website, your business is online – and it’s telling lies about your company. If you’ve never typed your company name into the Google search engine, you should do so. At a minimum, you are likely to find your company information on websites such as yellowpages.com, manta.com and others. Chances are also good that the information shown there is wrong. At the very minimum, you should work with those websites to make sure your information is accurate. Some will also let you post a picture of your company or include a couple of sentences about what your company does.

More troubling are the many places where disgruntled customers can post negative information about you. Angie’s List, Yelp.com, ContractorFromHell.com, Kudzu, BetterBusinessBureau.com and others let consumers vent frustrations with contractors. They’ll also use Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube to complain about the job you’ve done.

Before the Internet, it was said that one unhappy customer would tell 10 people. Now unhappy customers can tell millions – and those posts never go away. Fortunately, you can fight back. There are almost always two sides to a story, and most websites provide a mechanism for you to add your version of events.

But you can’t tell your side of the story if you don’t know that complaints are out there. A Google search will help you find websites with negative customer reviews. To find out whether people are complaining about you on Facebook or other social media sites, websites such as SocialMention.com, OpenBook.com and TweetBeep are good tools.

The decision to have a website or a Facebook page is yours. What people are saying about you online is beyond your control. But if you choose to ignore what people are saying, the consequences will hurt you, and you probably won’t even know why.