It is a serious problem for many companies online today who have either unscrupulous competitors who work hard to tarnish your reputation.
Therefor it is worth taking measures early on to dominate the search results for your own brand.
This further increases the difficulty of such an attack taking place since the age of links will have more relevancy and newcomers will have increasing difficulty to outrank the original links.
It should be considered as part of an companies larger search engine optimization efforts and any lack in this task should reflect badly on any company who had been employed in such a capacity.
The most competent companies in this sector will have factored this potential problem into their original plan and have an effective strategy to crowd out bad links and in doing so ensure that the most positive reviews of the brand are at the top of the search results for ones own brand.
This also has the effect of eliminating gaps which could be easy targets for ones competition to rank in and tout their own similar services and steal the original brands marketing efforts and traffic.