Your customers have their own idea about your brand and with today’s social technologies they communicate with each other and decide what your brand is. Listen to what they say and:

1. Find out what your brand stands for: Monitor the difference between the message you are trying to get across with what your customers or people and general are talking about.
2. Understand how the conversation is shifting in time: Social media can give you better answers than surveys on a weekly or even daily basis. There is a growing evidence about the correlation between social media buzz and sales.
3. Identify the influence sources: Find the people talking about your products, the so called influencers and cultivate them.
4. Manage PR crises: Monitoring your brand is an early warning system allowing to respond to a crisis before it escalates.
5. Generate new ideas: Listen and you can tap into the ideas your customers may have for new products or services

If listening to your customers is your current goal, expect at some point to be talking to them using social technologies– every fruitful conversation includes listening and talking.