Whether your rabbit hole reference point is "The Matrix" or "Alice in Wonderland," the metaphor is an apt one for discussing brand monitoring in the Web 2.0 world.

An engaging breakout session at the iMedia Brand Summit that included Tom Hespos from Underscore Marketing, Tom Troja from Pajamas Media, Sam Cimino from YouTube and Deborah Aho Williamson from eMarketer covered the topic of brand monitoring. One clear takeaway from this session was that when it comes to monitoring one's brand across the digital ecosystem, the rabbit hole is quite deep. And the rabbit hole is only likely to grow deeper, as eMarketer reports that user-generated content creators and users will swell from the current 69 million.

Some marketers and agencies may think this exercise is generally limited to subscribing to a few RSS feeds and monitoring a few blogs. In reality, as Hespos pointed out, brand monitors must not only take into account the rapidly expanding blog nation; they also must monitor email lists, the vast and ever expanding social networks -- both large and small -- message boards, chat rooms, and other public, peer-to-peer-based communications networks.

What's more, there are a range of new tools and next generation RSS widgets that marketers and their advisors can use to help monitor brands in the digital universe, including browser-based tools such as the Sage feature on the Firefox browser, blog search engines such as Ice Rocket and Sphere as well as many established tools such as Google Blogs and Technorati.

At a more tactical level, when engaging in the exercise of brand monitoring, you also have to know what you are looking for and where to look for it. It is quite obvious and intuitive to monitor and search the blogosphere for references to your company or brand name but this could only provide a sliver of the information, data and opinions that exist about your company, your brand and your broader competitive ecoystems. You should also be monitoring -- across all user-generated platforms -- terms and phrases such as specific product names, categories and vertical marketplaces, companies and environments in your distribution channel, your competitors and their product names and categories, news feeds from vertical business publications that cover your industry, and more.

Of course, once you have your arms around the exercise of how to monitor your brand, the next step is to have a strategy for processing, analyzing and making use of all the data and information you accumulate about your brand. The landscape is littered with dozens of success and horror stories in regards to brands engaging with customers on their turf. We all may be learning on-the-fly but the rules of engagement are becoming clearer and are essentially rooted in common-sense. Yet, it is always important to highlight some good examples of how to handle negative feedback.

Sam Cimino from YouTube pointed out an example where a YouTube user flamed NBC for doing promotional advertising on the video-sharing site and NBC responded with this clever reply. In this case, NBC not only was monitoring what people were saying about the network, the company reacted swiftly and quite artfully in poking fun at itself and, in the process, offering up a funny content piece that also serves as a very effective advertising vehicle.

The good news is that, according to a recent report from Yahoo! and comScore, approximately 90 percent or more of feedback and opinion-oriented content in the user-generated content ecosystem is positive in nature. This may initially strike you as inconceivable but the truth of the matter is that it is the negative feedback and attention that usually garners a disproportionate amount of the media attention (e.g., Dell Hell, the Chevy Tahoe example, etc.).

This then begs the question of how an organization can leverage and harness this goodwill that exists out there to nurture even deeper and more meaningful relationships with its current and potential customers.

Finally, as many companies are realizing, a truly comprehensive brand monitoring endeavor should be seen as a strategically critical component of any company's marketing communications efforts. It requires real investment in human capital and infrastructure and a true cultural commitment that includes support that runs from the C-suite all the way through the fabric of the organization. 

Your customers are volunteering gold mines of information about your brand, your products, your competitors and so much more. Are you mining it?

Drew Ianni is chair, programming and content, ad:tech. Read full bio.