Online reputation management

There's a lot of online marketing literature that I've seen lately about online reputation management. Normally, they're part of a pitch to purchase either a) a service to monitor postings online about your company or b) a service to make lots of postings about your company, hopefully driving the negative sites about your company out of the Google Top 10.

I recently got carpet installed, and one of the companies that we got a quote from was Empire Today. Rather than go into the whole experience, in general, if a salesperson invites you to go check out comparable prices, he either is very confident in his product, or he's betting that you're lazy, and his assurance will be enough for you. In this case, the local carpet store, without any high pressure sales, was considerably less expensive, for what seems to be a better product.

Four out of the top 10 results in Google, are for negative sites on the company.
It looks like Empire today, is trying their own version of reputation management. They have several testimonial sites: flooringstories.empiretoday.com and carpetstories.empiretoday.com that rank fairly well. Unfortunately, they don't hit authentic notes. The right side, containing Empire Today contact information, isn't quite keyword stuffing, but looks pretty close. And, there don't seem to be any negative reviews on the company site :)
There is a very thorough analysis of the Empire model from a blog called Flooring the Consumer, that I'd recommend if you're curious about how they relate to the overall flooring industry.