Brand Monitoring: you are (also) what others say about you

Reputation is your brand’s most valuable asset and, in the digital landscape, also the most exposed. The conversations that define its value are no longer confined to reviews on a website or comments on a social media page, but are fragmented into thousands of daily interactions that take place on ever-changing platforms, such as Google’s AI Overview summaries, Reddit threads, TikTok videos, and discussions in vertical communities.

If Warren Buffett said that “it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it,” today it takes even less, so you need to go beyond traditional mention monitoring, which is a purely defensive and insufficient activity. The real strategic challenge is to transform passive listening into a process of active intelligence, capable of interpreting market signals, anticipating crises, and identifying growth opportunities.

This guide offers you an operational approach to building a modern brand monitoring system: we will analyze the workflow to set up effective monitoring, the essential metrics to measure its results, and the tools, such as those found in SEOZoom, that allow you to connect data from Google, social media, and AI to get a complete picture and act with precision.

What is brand monitoring (and why is it a strategic activity today)?

Brand monitoring is a systematic process of scanning and analyzing digital channels that allows you to identify and evaluate conversations related to your brand.

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The goal is to collect data on how the brand is perceived by the public, customers, and the market, and then transform this information into strategic decisions. It means having a complete, real-time picture of your reputation, picking up on weak signals before they become established trends, and using feedback from the public to guide product improvement, marketing, and customer service actions.

It is not just about monitoring direct mentions, but also understanding the context in which these references occur, in order to verify the prevailing sentiment among people.

While in the past this activity could be considered a simple check of mentions, now you need to think of it as an essential business intelligence function.

In today’s fragmented and hyper-connected digital marketplace, public perception can change in a matter of hours, and monitoring ceases to be a reactive action and becomes a proactive navigation system. With this approach, you can understand your positioning, protect your brand value, and guide your future actions based on concrete data, not just intuition.

A practical and operational definition

Literally brand monitoring, we can define brand monitoring as a business analysis process of various web and media channels to keep track of the information out there about the company, its products, the brand, and anything explicitly related to the business.

The theoretical reference is the broader concept of “reputation management,” which argues that the public’s perception of a brand can have a significant impact on the company’s success. Therefore, by monitoring and responding to mentions of the brand, companies can positively influence their reputation.

Effective brand monitoring is defined as a continuous operational cycle that can be broken down into three distinct and interconnected phases: listening, analysis, and action.

Listening is the phase in which, through advanced technologies, you map and intercept conversations about you across a wide range of channels, from social media to forums, news sites, and review platforms. Analysis is when you transform raw data into strategic intelligence; by qualifying sentiment, identifying recurring themes, and understanding the context, you make sense of the background “noise” and distinguish relevant information. Finally, action is the informed response to what has emerged: it can take the form of timely management of a reputational crisis, optimization of a marketing campaign, or creation of new content that responds to the emerging needs of your audience.

The main historical theories on brand monitoring

To understand the scope of this discipline, you need to know about its evolution, which reflects the transformation of communication channels.

The concept of brand monitoring did not originate with the internet, but has deep roots in the public relations practices of the last century.

Originally, the activity consisted of manually collecting press clippings, a meticulous task that allowed you to keep track of your visibility in traditional media. With the advent of the web, the focus shifted to digital content, and tools such as Google Alerts represented the first form of automation for tracking mentions. The real revolution came with the explosion of social media, which transformed every user into a potential publisher, giving rise to social listening. The subsequent fragmentation of the digital landscape, with the integration of AI, video, and vertical communities, has made a holistic and integrated approach essential for effectiveness.

Brand monitoring vs. social listening: the operational differences

You may often hear the terms “brand monitoring” and “social listening” used interchangeably, but it is important to understand the operational differences between them in order to structure your strategy correctly.

Social listening focuses specifically and in depth on analyzing conversations that take place exclusively on social channels—Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn—analyzing mentions, hashtags, and conversations to understand sentiment and emerging trends in that specific environment. Its purpose is tactical: to manage the community, understand sentiment, identify influencers, and measure the performance of your social campaigns.

Brand monitoring, on the other hand, takes a broader and more strategic perspective. It includes data from social listening, but enriches it with information gathered from a much wider range of sources: newspapers, blogs, forums, review sites, and above all, search engine results and responses generated by artificial intelligence.

Social listening is therefore a vital component, but still a subset of a comprehensive brand monitoring strategy.

The role of monitoring in the era of Search Everywhere Optimization

The need for an extended approach that goes beyond social listening alone directly impacts your work due to the new rules of brand visibility, which today is built on a much broader playing field than just Google SERP.

The concept of “Search Everywhere Optimization” describes precisely this reality, in which people search for and find information about your brand across a fragmented set of digital surfaces. Your reputation is therefore defined as much by a review on Google Maps as by a video on YouTube that ranks for a comparative query, or by a thread on Reddit that is used as a source by an AI Overview or a gallery of images on Pinterest.

These surfaces are interconnected: a crisis that arises on X can quickly translate into articles in online newspapers, which in turn can influence AI-generated summaries. Effective brand monitoring provides a multi-channel and integrated view, understanding how performance on one platform influences perception on another and ensuring a consistent and solid presence wherever the audience searches, talks, and interacts. Conversely, an approach limited to a single channel is inherently incomplete and risky because it fails to capture the complex dynamics that link different sources and determine your overall perception.

What is brand monitoring for?

Implementing brand monitoring brings you measurable benefits, because structured listening allows you to move from a reactive position, where you are subject to events, to a proactive one, where you anticipate problems and seize opportunities as they arise.

This translates into better protection of your brand value and more informed business decisions based on real data from the market rather than mere assumptions.

Essentially, monitoring helps you achieve two interconnected macro-objectives: on the one hand, protecting the reputation you have already built by managing risks in a controlled manner; on the other, using the insights you gather to create new value, innovate, and build a stronger relationship of trust with your audience.

From reactive defense to reputational risk management

The most immediate value you get from monitoring is the defense of your reputation. If negative information can go viral in a matter of hours, the ability to intercept criticism or an unfavorable review as soon as it is published is a huge strategic advantage, allowing you to analyze the situation with a cool head, prepare an appropriate response, and intervene before a single incident turns into a large-scale crisis.

Intercepting negative feedback or critical reviews in real time allows you to intervene before the problem spreads, managing the situation transparently and limiting the damage.

You should consider online reviews as a determining factor in the purchasing process: BrightLocal‘s “Local Consumer Review Survey 2025” confirms that 96% of consumers read them before making a decision, and the impact on business is direct, because 89% of consumers are likely to choose a business that responds to all reviews, whether positive or negative.

From passive listening to proactive strategy

While risk management protects the value you have already built, strategic listening allows you to create new value. Users’ spontaneous conversations are an inexhaustible source of insights to guide your strategy. By analyzing what your audience says about you and your competitors, you can identify unmet needs and recurring pain points, gaining valuable insights for product innovation or the creation of truly useful content. Furthermore, by analyzing the volume of mentions and the associated sentiment before, during, and after a campaign, you can assess its real impact on brand awareness.

According to GWI, 49% of consumers follow brands on social media to be the first to know about new products. Monitoring allows you to identify these needs and guide your editorial plan, creating articles, videos, or posts that answer real questions and capture the interest of your audience, positioning you as an authoritative source in your industry.

Also pay attention to the words you use in your relationship with the public: responding to feedback, both positive and negative, demonstrates attention and transparency. The majority of consumers say that a company’s response to a review has changed their perspective on that business.

To act proactively, however, you must first know who you are, and this is where consistency with your brand archetype (the Hero, the Sage, the Explorer) comes into play, providing you with a compass to define the tone of voice and style with which to respond and communicate. A response consistent with your brand identity not only solves a problem, but also strengthens brand perception and builds an authentic relationship of trust, a factor that 71% of consumers say is more important than ever before when purchasing or using their services and products.

The link with SEO: how monitoring strengthens authority

You should also think of brand monitoring as a fundamental tool for your SEO strategy, because it directly affects the principles of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) that Google uses to evaluate the quality of websites.

Here too, we can be guided by an aphorism: “Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is.” These are the words of journalist and writer Chris Anderson, who, among other things, was the long-time editor-in-chief of Wired USA. He urges you not to underestimate the value of immediately presenting a good image of your brand in SERPs, in order to avoid possible serious negative effects.

When you monitor online conversations, you are gathering evidence of your authority. Every positive review, every mention in an industry publication, every discussion in a forum where you are mentioned as a point of reference is a signal that helps build the perception of your expertise. By analyzing the sentiment and context of these conversations, you can understand how your brand is perceived by users and, consequently, how it might be interpreted by Google’s algorithms.

If people talk about you as an expert, Google is likely to start considering you as such too. In this sense, monitoring allows you to identify areas where your authority is already strong and those where you need to invest, guiding your content marketing and link building strategy to strengthen the signals that matter most for your organic ranking.

The focus on online visibility: web monitoring or SEO monitoring

In fact, those who work on visibility often talk about web monitoring or even SEO monitoring, referring specifically to the main channels where users find information or search for news about a brand. As always, the latest figures help us to frame the context:

• The habit of searching for information about a brand before making a purchase has become established: today, as many as 80% of consumers use search engines to find information about a company.
• Transparency has become a non-negotiable factor, so much so that 59% of users are ready to stop using a brand if they perceive it as lacking transparency.
• Furthermore, the link between a company’s values and purchasing decisions is becoming increasingly close: two out of three consumers choose, avoid, or actively boycott a brand based on its position on social or political issues.

Against the backdrop of these behaviors, the playing field has expanded and accelerated: while in the past the web was browsed by about 64% of the world’s population, today that figure has reached 67.9%. And while just a few years ago, just over one in five people shopped online in a month, now almost 60% of internet users make an online purchase every week, with Google no longer the only starting point for the customer journey.

Mentions and citations, the first aspect to track

The process of researching and managing your brand’s online reputation begins with tracking mentions.

Remember: not all the SEO value you receive from the web comes through a hyperlink. You must learn to recognize and value unlinked mentions as well: all those citations in which your brand, product, or content is mentioned within a text without a direct link to your site.

Even without a direct link, these mentions are important signals for Google that help build your authority. Each citation acts as social proof that reinforces your brand’s entity and consolidates its relevance within your industry, fueling E-E-A-T factors.

The most strategic part of your job is to turn this implicit value into an explicit asset.

Through careful monitoring, you can map all these “orphan” citations and initiate targeted public relations activities, contacting authors or site owners to turn a simple mention into a valuable backlink. But mentions are also useful for intuitively checking whether your backlink profile is balanced or unnatural, by evaluating the ratio of citations to backlinks: Simply put, if you receive an excessive amount of backlinks and few mentions (a typical situation of an overly aggressive link building campaign), you may appear suspicious to Google compared to the natural distribution of your industry, thus increasing the risk of incurring a penalty.

How to set up an effective brand monitoring workflow

To be effective, your brand monitoring requires a structured approach. If you rely on sporadic and improvised checks, you risk collecting disorganized data, missing critical signals, and wasting valuable time.

A well-defined workflow, on the other hand, transforms listening into a scalable and repeatable process capable of generating constant value.

Think of this activity not as a rigid cage, but as a map that guides you from strategic planning to results analysis. It allows you to put your actions in order, ensure that every piece of data collected has a specific purpose, and transform information into decisions that truly improve your business.

Here are the four operational steps to building a solid and functional monitoring process.

1. Define the objectives and keywords to track. The first step you need to take is to give direction to your work. Ask yourself, “What do I want to achieve with this activity?” Your goals should be specific and measurable, such as improving sentiment by 10% in six months, reducing response times to complaints to less than 24 hours, or discovering three new topics for the blog each quarter. Once you have defined your goals, you can move on to selecting the keywords to monitor. These include not only your brand name, but also acronyms, names of flagship products, key figures in your company (such as the CEO, managers, or other spokespersons), campaign slogans, and the most common variations, including typos that users might make.
2. Choosing which channels to monitor. No brand needs to monitor every single corner of the web. Choosing the right channels depends on your business model and target audience. If you operate in B2B, your priority channels will likely be LinkedIn, X, industry publications, and specialized forums. If you work in B2C, your focus will be on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and major review sites such as Trustpilot or Google Business Profile listings. Your task is to map the digital places where your customers spend time, get information, and exchange opinions. This targeted selection allows you to focus your resources where conversations have the greatest impact.
3. Selecting tools and setting up alerts. Once you have defined your goals and channels, you can choose the most suitable tools. The decision depends on your budget, the complexity of your needs, and the level of automation you want. You can start with free solutions for basic monitoring, but for in-depth analysis, you will need integrated platforms that offer advanced metrics. Regardless of the tool you choose, it is essential that you configure your alerts correctly. Set up real-time notifications for the most critical mentions, such as a negative article in a major newspaper, and daily or weekly alerts to receive a general summary of conversations.
4. Data analysis and reporting. Data collection is just the beginning. Your work begins when you receive a notification, because the most important phase is analyzing and interpreting what you have collected. This is where you extract strategic insights: what are the most recurring themes? Is the overall sentiment improving or worsening? Which channels generate the most conversations? The results of this analysis must be summarized in clear, periodic reports, with graphical displays that facilitate understanding, to be shared with the relevant departments (marketing, sales, product) to guide future decisions.

Brand monitoring tools

The choice of brand monitoring tools depends directly on the objectives you have defined. The market offers a wide range of solutions, each with specific advantages and compromises in terms of cost, complexity, and scope of analysis.

There is no such thing as a perfect tool, but there is a solution that best suits your needs, your strategic maturity, and your budget. To guide you, you can think of a three-level path: the starting point, represented by free tools, ideal for those just starting out; vertical solutions, designed for those with specific needs such as in-depth social media analysis; and finally, the integrated approach, which allows you to connect data from multiple sources to get a complete and strategic overview.

Free tools and their limitations

To start monitoring your brand without investing a budget, the most common starting point is Google Alerts. This tool allows you to set up email notifications for each new mention of a keyword that is indexed by Google. It is a useful solution for basic monitoring, especially for keeping track of articles on blogs and news sites.

However, you need to be aware of its operational limitations: notifications often arrive late, when the conversation has already evolved, and coverage is partial, as many mentions, especially those on social media and forums, are completely missed. Above all, Google Alerts does not offer you any quantitative or sentiment analysis. It is effectively a notification tool, not an analysis tool, and its effectiveness is insufficient for professional and proactive management of your reputation.

Platforms specializing in social listening

When the limitations of free tools become an obstacle, the next step many companies take is to turn to advanced platforms for social listening and brand monitoring such as Brandwatch, Talkwalker, or Mention.

This software is extremely powerful in analyzing conversations taking place on social channels, offering you detailed metrics on engagement, hashtag reach, and sentiment analysis. These tools are ideal for social media managers who need in-depth data to optimize campaigns and manage communities.

Their limitation, however, is their inherently vertical perspective: they are exceptional at analyzing the world of social media, but often do not provide you with a complete picture of what is happening outside of it. They leave equally important channels such as niche blogs, forums, review sites, and, above all, do not connect social conversations to what is happening in Google’s SERPs and AI Overviews.

How to use SEOZoom for integrated monitoring

To overcome the fragmentation between different channels, you need an integrated approach that connects social conversations with your organic visibility. SEOZoom, while originally created as a platform for organic visibility, now offers you this overview, allowing you to use a set of tools that link reputation signals to search engine performance.

• AI Overview: with this tool, you can check if and how your brand is mentioned in responses generated by Google’s artificial intelligence. It helps you understand which sources the algorithm considers most authoritative when talking about you and in what context you are associated.
• Projects: within a project, you can set up daily tracking of your branded keywords and the most sensitive queries. If a critical article or negative review starts climbing the SERP, you’ll find out in less than 24 hours, giving you the time you need to prepare a strategic response before the issue becomes visible to a wider audience.
• Backlink analysis: This feature allows you to distinguish simple text mentions from actual backlinks. This way, you can evaluate the authority of the sources talking about you and understand the SEO impact of those citations, turning a digital PR activity into a tangible asset for your ranking.
• Monitor social profiles and social trends: these tools provide you with the social listening capabilities you need to track engagement, content, and hot topics related to your brand on major platforms, integrating social data into the overall picture of your online visibility.

Operational strategies to defend and strengthen your brand

Once you have set up a listening workflow and are clear about the risks, you need to move on to the active phase: how do you respond to what you have discovered?

Brand defense and strengthening strategies are based, as mentioned, on a methodical approach that transforms every interaction, even negative ones, into an opportunity to consolidate trust and improve public perception.

The goal is not to erase criticism—you can’t do that, no one can—but to manage it professionally, learn from feedback, and actively amplify the positive narrative you want to associate with your brand.

Proactive management of reviews and feedback

The first step is to understand that review management is not a task to be delegated to spare time, but a constant strategic focus. You need to establish a clear policy for responding to all types of feedback: first and foremost, always thank customers for positive reviews, showing appreciation and reinforcing their behavior.

For negative reviews, the rule is to respond publicly in a timely, professional manner and never defensively. Acknowledge the problem, express regret for the negative experience, and offer a concrete solution or a private contact channel to discuss the issue further. A well-managed response is not only addressed to the dissatisfied customer, but to all the people who will read that review in the future, demonstrating that you are a company that listens and cares about its customers.

How to respond to criticism and turn it into an opportunity

Let’s dwell on this last point. Although difficult to receive, criticism is one of the most valuable sources of information at your disposal. Every complaint about a product, every report of poor service, every piece of feedback about a frustrating user experience is a clear indication of where you can improve.

Your strategy must include an internal process for collecting, categorizing, and analyzing this criticism, transforming it into input for the product team, marketing department, or customer service. When you communicate to your audience that you have solved a problem they reported (“You asked us to improve X, and we did”), you not only demonstrate that you are listening, but you also transform initial negativity into a powerful story of improvement and customer care, strengthening loyalty.

Create content that reinforces the brand’s positive narrative

Reputation defense is also proactive. While managing negative feedback, you must constantly work to fuel the conversation with content that highlights your values, strengths, and positive customer stories.

This means actively creating and distributing case studies, testimonials, in-depth articles that demonstrate your expertise, and interviews that give your company a human face. This content, optimized for search engines and promoted on social channels, acts as a reputational “firewall”: it builds a solid and authoritative brand image that makes your brand less vulnerable to attacks and isolated criticism, because the weight of the positive evidence you have sown over time will always be greater.

The metrics that matter: how to measure online reputation

If you really want to turn brand monitoring into a strategic analysis tool, you need to define and measure the right metrics—the “usual” KPIs, the indicators that allow you to quantify the perception of your brand, evaluate the effectiveness of your actions, and demonstrate the value of monitoring to the rest of your organization.

The goal is not to accumulate data (in which you will then get lost), but to focus on a few key references that tell you a clear story—and allow you to stay focused and obtain clear and actionable reports. The measurement process can start with the most basic data, the volume of conversations, and then move on to qualifying their tone and, finally, evaluating their authority in new contexts defined by artificial intelligence.

Measuring quantity: Share of Voice to understand your visibility

The first and most fundamental dimension you need to measure is quantity: how many online conversations are about you compared to your total market? The metric that answers this question is Share of Voice (SoV), which counts your mentions in absolute terms and, above all, puts them into perspective and in relation to the market, comparing them with those of your direct competitors.

It is calculated simply by dividing your brand mentions by the total mentions in the sector (yours plus those of your competitors). A growing SoV is a powerful signal: it tells you that your marketing and communication strategies are working and that you are gaining relevance and attention at the expense of your rivals.

For an even more useful analysis, you need to segment SoV by channel: you may find that you dominate the conversation on LinkedIn, but are almost absent on TikTok. This allows you to understand where you are already winning and where you need to invest to strengthen your presence.

Assessing quality: Sentiment Analysis to interpret conversations

The next step is to understand the nature of the conversions you have identified—having high visibility is useless, if not harmful, when most mentions are negative. This is the field of Sentiment Analysis, the process that classifies mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, giving you a qualitative picture of public perception.

This analysis provides you with context that quantitative data alone cannot give you. A spike in mentions can celebrate the success of a launch or signal the beginning of a reputation crisis; only sentiment can tell you. You can use this metric strategically: by analyzing negative sentiment, you can often identify specific issues with your product or customer service that need to be addressed.

At the same time, by monitoring sentiment during a campaign, you can understand whether your message is resonating with your audience in the right way.

Verify authority: mentions in AI Overview as a new KPI

In addition to measuring how many people are talking about you and how they are talking about you, you now need to consider a new indicator of authority: your presence in AI-generated responses. Being cited as a source in Google’s AI Overview is not like getting a simple mention on a blog: it means that the algorithm has identified you as such a credible and relevant source that it uses you to build its official response to a question.

It is a sign of the highest level of trust and thematic authority, telling you whether your content is considered useful to users and reliable to machines. Monitoring these mentions is complex, but with SEOZoom’s AI Overview, you can track your presence in these responses, while also checking your AI Rank, i.e., the prominence of your citation within the generated text.

The risks of poor management: what happens when you don’t listen

Ignoring online conversations about your brand doesn’t mean they aren’t happening—you’re simply letting others define your narrative, often in the most damaging way possible. Poor reputation management, or worse, a total lack of oversight, is like a debt that accumulates and presents a very hefty bill.

The damage manifests itself in concrete economic losses, greater difficulty in growing, and a progressive loss of control over your market positioning.

As Pixelcutlabs points out, the presence of inaccurate and untruthful statements about a business that are published for all to see is a humiliating and devastating experience, especially when they are undeserved. Some statistics frame the problem:

• 92% of consumers read online reviews.
• 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
• Over 80% of the risk of damage to reputation comes from sensationalism not based on reality.
• 75% of brand value is based on a company’s reputation.
• 59% of companies have had a public relations crisis, but only 54% have a plan in place in case this happens.

Erosion of trust and direct impact on sales

Every unread negative review, every ignored critical comment, every forum discussion that highlights a problem with your product is, in short, a crack in the relationship of trust with your audience. You must consider that most of your potential customers “meet” you for the first time through the words of others.

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Online reviews have become the new word of mouth, and their impact is enormous: everyone reads at least one review before taking any significant action, so a negative digital reputation acts as an invisible barrier that blocks conversions before the user even arrives on your site.

The correlation with revenue is direct, as we have seen, and a series of negative reviews results in a slow but steady erosion of your brand’s perceived value, forcing you to compete more and more on price and less and less on quality, a grueling battle from which it is difficult to emerge victorious.

Loss of control over brand narrative

Let’s repeat: if you don’t tell your story, someone else will, and almost certainly not in the way you would prefer.

If you don’t actively monitor, the dominant narrative about your brand will be defined by a dissatisfied customer, an aggressive competitor, or inaccurate information that goes viral. A single YouTube video, Reddit thread, or critical article can reach a huge audience in a matter of hours, crystallizing a negative perception that is difficult to eradicate.

Without a listening system, you will only discover these problems when they have already become public knowledge and the damage has already been done. At that point, you will no longer be communicating your strengths, but will be forced to defend yourself, spending energy and resources to correct a narrative that you no longer have control over.

Communication disasters: real examples of mistakes that undermine reputation

To fully understand the impact of an unmonitored reputation, you need to look at what has happened to companies and brands that have underestimated the speed and power of digital conversations. The following examples are not isolated incidents, but strategic lessons that show you how active monitoring is now a necessity to protect the value of your business.

• The Nestlé vs. Greenpeace case (2010). The crisis erupts with a viral Greenpeace campaign against the use of palm oil in KitKat, linked to deforestation. The digital dynamic is unleashed on Facebook and YouTube, where users flood Nestlé’s channels with negative comments and altered logos. The company’s strategic error was an authoritarian reaction: instead of engaging in dialogue, it attempted to censor content and responded aggressively, further fueling the protest. The consequences were global damage to its image and the perception of a deaf and arrogant brand, forced to change suppliers only after weeks of public pressure, suffering the conversation instead of leading it.
• The Barilla case and the crisis of values (2013). A single radio interview in which President Guido Barilla excludes homosexual families from the brand’s communication triggers an immediate global crisis. The hashtag #boicottabarilla goes viral in a matter of hours, ridden by consumers and competitors. The strategic error was a delayed response that was perceived as insufficient, the result of a failure to understand the scope and sentiment of the online conversation in real time. The consequences were an international boycott, serious damage to the brand’s reputation and a competitive advantage handed to competitors who were more adept at engaging in the dialogue with inclusive campaigns.
• The United Airlines case and the power of real time (2017). The incident involving passenger David Dao, who was forcibly removed from an overbooked flight, was captured on the smartphones of other passengers, and the videos went viral around the world. The strategic error was twofold: first, the poor handling of the event, then a cold and bureaucratic corporate communication that described the passenger as “belligerent,” amplifying public anger. The consequences were a collapse in the stock market, with an estimated loss of hundreds of millions of dollars, and colossal damage to the company’s image, transforming the event into a negative symbol of customer service.
• The Chiara Ferragni case and “Pandoro-gate” (2023-2024). The reputational crisis erupts when the AGCM fines the digital entrepreneur for unfair commercial practices linked to a charity operation. The news spreads instantly across every platform, but it is the handling of the response that defines the disaster: an apology video, analyzed, criticized, and parodied, fuels a national debate. The strategic error is communication perceived as lacking transparency, followed by crisis management that fails to appease negative sentiment but instead fuels it. The consequences are tangible: an investigation for aggravated fraud, the loss of sponsors and, above all, the erosion of her main asset, credibility.
• The “kiss cam” case of the managers of Astronomer (2025). This case shows you how the boundary between private and public has now been blurred and how the actions of individuals can trigger a corporate crisis in a matter of hours. During a Coldplay concert, the “kiss cam” focuses on the CEO and HR manager of the tech company Astronomer. The video, which captures them in a private moment, immediately goes viral, accumulating tens of millions of views and triggering an online hunt to identify them. The company’s strategic mistake is its silence: for over 52 hours, it does not issue any statement, completely losing control of the narrative, which is dominated by memes, speculation, and fake news. The consequences are drastic and immediate: both executives are forced to resign, forcing the company to reorganize its top management and manage a profound crisis of internal and external trust. The episode becomes a case study on how a company’s reputation is inextricably linked to that of its representatives, even outside working hours.

Brand Monitoring: Final Thoughts and Key FAQs

Implementing an effective monitoring system is a strategic process that transforms the way you listen to the market and manage your reputation. As we have seen, it is no longer a matter of reacting passively to mentions, but of using listening to guide your decisions, anticipate risks, and build a stronger and more resilient brand.

This approach requires method, the right tools, and a clear understanding of your objectives. The process can raise practical questions, especially at the beginning.

That’s why we’ve compiled answers to the most common questions to help you clarify every operational aspect and get off on the right foot.

1. What is brand monitoring today?

It is a strategic intelligence activity that allows you to listen, analyze, and act on conversations about your brand across all digital channels: search engines, social media, forums, news, and AI responses. Its purpose is to protect your reputation and identify opportunities for growth.

2. What are the best tools for brand monitoring?

Choosing the right tool depends on your needs. You can start with free tools such as Google Alerts for basic monitoring, but for professional analysis, you will need more structured platforms. Solutions such as SEOZoom offer you an integrated approach, allowing you to simultaneously monitor mentions on search engines, in AI responses, and on social media, linking the data to your organic visibility for a complete view.

3. How much does brand monitoring cost?

Costs can vary greatly. You can start for free with limited tools, but be aware that the data will be partial and often delayed. Professional platforms have monthly subscription costs that depend on the volume of mentions to be analyzed, the number of channels you want to monitor, and the depth of the analysis offered. The investment should always be commensurate with the value of your brand’s reputation to protect.

4. What is the difference between brand monitoring and social listening?

Social listening focuses exclusively on analyzing conversations that take place on social channels. Brand monitoring, on the other hand, has a broader scope: it includes social listening data but integrates it with information from news, blogs, forums, review sites, and, above all, search engine results. The former is a tactic, the latter a comprehensive strategy.

5. How do you measure brand sentiment?

Sentiment is measured using natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that are trained to recognize the emotional tone of a text and classify it as positive, negative, or neutral. Most professional monitoring tools integrate this functionality, providing you with graphs and aggregated data that help you understand the qualitative perception of your brand over time.

6. Is it possible to monitor the competition as well?

Yes, competitor monitoring is one of the most strategic uses of these tools. By setting up alerts and analyses on competing brands, you can understand their communication strategies, identify their weaknesses through customer complaints, discover their successful campaigns, and find market spaces where you can position yourself more effectively.

7. What is the first step in starting brand monitoring?

The first step is to define your goals. Before you even choose a tool, you need to ask yourself what you want to achieve: do you want to protect yourself from crises, find ideas for new content, or better understand what customers think about your product? Once you have a clear goal, you can define the keywords to track and the most important channels to monitor.

8. What is the link between brand monitoring and SEO?

The link is very close. Monitoring conversations helps you discover new keywords and search intent among your audience. In addition, managing your reputation directly influences the trust that users (and Google) place in your brand, a key factor for E-E-A-T. Tracking your branded keywords in an SEOZoom Project, for example, allows you to see if negative content is climbing the SERP and take prompt action.

9. How often should I check mentions?

The frequency depends on the size of your brand and the volume of conversations. For critical mentions (e.g., in newspapers or by influencers), it’s a good idea to have real-time alerts. For a general analysis of sentiment and trends, a weekly or monthly report is usually sufficient to identify patterns and guide your medium- to long-term strategy.

10. What happens if I don’t do brand monitoring?

If you don’t monitor your brand, you risk losing control of your public narrative, suffering an erosion of customer trust that directly impacts sales. Ignoring online conversations exposes you to unexpected reputational crises and prevents you from gathering valuable feedback to improve your products and strategy.