You control the perception of your brand on your website, even on your Facebook and Twitter profiles. You can track your user demographics and analytics to a T. You might think it’s tidily under control … but your brand has been sneaking out at night and quite possibly leading a double life.

With a beaucoup of restrictions at home and the multitude of irresistible social media sites, blogs, groups, forums, etc. out there, it was inevitable. Your brand is blossoming and, with that, is making new friends (or enemies), demanding some independence and making a name for itself outside of your closely guarded realm. That is, people are likely discussing/rating your brand off your radar, and other people are forming opinions and making decisions based on those discussions. So what do you do?

You hone in on those discussions and help guide them. Find out exactly where your brand has been sneaking off to, who it’s hanging out with and why they appeal to each other. What do they do together? What kinds of conversations do they have? Join them. Start new ones.

With buzz metrics tools, you can track mentions of your brand on a plethora of sites, view data in chart and graph format, pinpoint any spikes or dips in your brand activity, view demographics, most active keywords, even sentiment analysis (designed to help decipher positive/negative opinions) and drilldown into combinations of data.
There are some pretty swift (free and paid) monitoring applications out there for getting to know your brand across the entire social media sphere.  Take Me To Your Leader has a thorough list of free tools. For something more robust check out Sysomos Heartbeat 2.0 or any of these.  

Neilsen’s Blog Pulse is a great place to see what folks are talking about — even if unrelated to your brand — then get creative to tie your brand into the hot topics you see fit. Check out WOMMA (word of mouth marketing association) for extra tips and resources about encouraging and facilitating positive conversations. 

You might just find that you have as much to learn from your brand as it does from you.