[creative_master]

When is the last time you thought about your customer? Or, an even more important question, when was the last time you considered what people might be saying about your brand?

According to a recent report released by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, marketers are doing a poor job of monitoring their brands and their customer's experience online, despite the dynamic growth of message boards, social networks and word of mouth chatter.

The Calif.-based organization surveyed more than 400 senior marketers on the way they measure and address customer experience. The report discovered that few people are capitalizing on the opportunity to leverage customer feedback. Of all the participants that were surveyed, only 16 percent are monitoring message boards and social networking websites.

Some other findings in the survey included:

* Only 37 percent of companies gather customer insight from customer engagements situations.

* About 60 percent did not compensate employees or executives for helping build customer loyalty or satisfaction.

* Only 23 percent track or measure customer feedback emails.

The biggest issue here is the lack of companies listening to what customers have to say. It is not difficult to continuously monitor conversations online, and the cost that comes along with this task is not overly priced. With the right technology, you can easily listen in on those conversations and draw out meaningful data.

The platforms that exist are not too expensive, and gather data effectively - measuring all levels of the conversation happening around your brand. Buzzlogic, Radian6, and Buzzmetrics, are just a few of the many hosted platforms that monitor media coverage and help you measure online sentiment.

These channels help you gather data quickly, so you avoid losing any disconnect with your customers. Remember, it is the customer that matters in the end. Many marketers don't have enough strategies for recovering lost customers.

Measuring social media, discussion boards and the always powerful, word-of-mouth, will help with your customer retention effectiveness, and always keep you aware of what 'people' are saying about your brand.

Without the proper monitoring, feedback from customers gathered through social channels is usually gathered by companies and processed in a manner of thinking how quickly a complaint or issue can be addressed. Instead, you need to be thinking of how to use this information to gain insight. It's about thinking more qualitative about the information, rather than the usual quantitative approach marketers traditionally take.

Consider your brand for a moment; are you properly monitoring the discussion happening with your company?