The prominent way online reputation management is done is by pushing positive content higher up in the search engines so that the negative content moves down.
Although it sounds straightforward, reputation management is a tedious and time consuming task. Simply creating a lot of content and social media profiles will not do the job and you will also need to do SEO and Link Building. It is best you let a professional do this, but if you are on a tight budget there are definatly some things you can do on your own that may help.
The links you build would need to come from popular sites in order to have an effect. Low quality links from mom and pop type websites would not help. Directory links, blog comments, forum links and sponsored ads most often would even penalize your rankings, so you need to know what you are doing.
The bottom line is, even if you figure out what needs to be done, you will have to either spend a lot of time doing it yourself, or you will need to pay someone to do it for you. In the end, it will cost you time and money to repair your reputation.
As far as some specific recommendations, you should create social profiles on most popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and others. Also, create profiles and videos and post on Youtube, Vimeo and DailyMotion. Also, Slideshare works well for posting a presentation which may rank high.
In my future posts, I will go into more specifics and other recommendations.