How many times have you been having a conversation with someone, and don’t feel like they’re listening?

You talk, they nod, but you feel like it’s going in one ear and out the other.

Isn’t it frustrating?

It can be just as frustrating for others when you or your company isn’t listening. With the widespread arena of social media, dialogue is happening all around us, but unfortunately; people and companies are rarely listening.

So, what can you do about it?

Start listening. It really is that simple. Tools like twitter search and google alerts have made it easy to find out when people and companies are talking about you and your company. You can set them to monitor names, phrases, important competitors, whatever you would like. There are even tools for your desktop that can keep the searches at the forefront of your attention. This allows you  to react almost instantly to question, concerns and  potential customers.

Just a reminder, even with all these cool tools to help you monitor, an old-fashioned manual search should still be done weekly. There are many items that can slip through the cracks, and it is important to catch them. Manual searches also help you to gauge your search engine optimization and what the competitors are doing. Go google (or bing, or yahoo, or msn live) yourself. Did you expect everything you found? Probably not. Can you react to the bad, capture the good and learn from the others? Absolutely.

If this sounds like a lot of work – it is. Brand management and listening to the conversation takes a lot of time and energy. So, if you can’t do it yourself, make sure to find someone that can. Time is not an excuse for not monitoring the conversation.

Are you listening yet?