I’ve been following the topic of reputation monitoring for a little while now, because BlogBridge is an ideal and powerful tool to use in the service of Reputation monitoring and management. Here’s an interesting liveblog of a panel about Reputation Monitoring and Management at WebmasterWorld by Tamar Weinberg of techpedia fame.
From that panel, here’s a great list of what can and should be monitored, from this panel:

What should you track? Products, company, competitors, recalls, scandals, industry, keywords, patents, executives, etc.Industry tracking:

• moreover.com/categories/category_list_rss.html - say you really want to keep track of what’s going on in your industry. Moreover allows you to follow everything in the industry such as trends and developments.
• mainstream news (news.google.com)
• news buzz (Digg). labs.digg.com/diggspyblog posts (Technorati). If you cover Google News and Technorati, you get about 90% of what’s out there.blog posts (blogsearch.google.com)
• blog comments (co.mments.com)
• blog conversations (blogpulse.com/conversation)
• blog trends (blogpulse.com/trends)
• bookmarks (del.icio.us/popular)
• photos (Flickr)
• videos (video.google.com)
• tags (keotag.com)
• forum posts (boardtracker.com)
• changing information (wikipedia, profile pages)
• customer reviews (epinions.com)
• new product opportunities (amazon.com/tag/iphone)
• search queries (google.com/trends)
• email updates (google.com/alerts)
• the untrackable (copernic.com - $50 for a onetime fee and you can track any changes to a page)

(From: interesting liveblog of a panel about Reputation Monitoring and Management at WebmasterWorld)

Quite a list, eh. If you have multiple products or businesses, then it becomes clear that some kind of automated tool is required…And then, what do you do when your monitoring starts producing results? (Remember, both positive and negative mentions might be worth responding to.) In a word, “respond.” Again the liveblog of the panel has some good ideas:

“How do you do this? Comment.

Remember, companies are led by people and people make mistakes. Acknowledge your wrongs and the steps taken to correct the problem. People who admit their wrongs fare much better (in terms of following) than those who don’t.

Publish a co-joining statement. Do it on your website if you don’t have a blog. For example, Steve Jobs did that with the $200 discount on iPhones. Make sure your side of the story is clearly communicated.

Don’t apologize and then repeat the errors. Nobody likes Facebook because they’re doing the same thing and screwing people over.

If someone is complaining and you can’t do anything about it, acknowledge what they said and make them feel like you heard them (empathy!). If they know that you cared enough, you’ll feel better. (I feel like Digg should take note of my rants on my very nice and beautiful mostly Digg-themed blog.)”

BlogBridge can play a significant role in this. With BlogBridge you can create arbitrarily sophisticated “SmartFeeds” to form kind of a funnel that monitors most of these sources and distills the information to a point where you can actually have a prayer of keeping up with them.