More and more companies are starting to realize that Twitter is an excellent (and free!) way for them to monitor how people (or, to be more precise, a particular sub-section of people) feel and converse about their brand, company or product. With folks pouring out their minds and thoughts in 140-character bursts, a great deal of discussion circulates around products and services, and companies are waking up to the fact that these tweets aren't only relevant, they're super-relevant due to the fact that other consumers can read (and be affected by) them.

It's important, then, for companies to know how to track their brand or products (or, even better, their competitor's brand or products) on Twitter. Unfortunately, most companies haven't woken up to this fact enough to invest any significant amount of capital into the issue; that means that Twitter "ambassadors" are going to have to figure out how to monitor their company's brands, products and services on the cheap.

Luckily, there's a wide collection of third-party applications and services to help you do exactly that. We'll introduce a few to you, and hopefully our readers will let us know of any others they've encountered in their travels.

1) Third-Party Twitter Clients with Real-Time Keyword Search Features

Most third-party Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop or Twitterrific feature real-time search features. Essentially, real-time Twitter search features perform search queries (using Twitter's search syntax) against Twitter's feed and return results to the user's client, often providing users with a variety of notification options like noises, slide-open windows, and so on. Running a real-time search for your product, brand or service will allow you to see what people are saying about you, right now. It'll give you a chance to find out how opinions about your brand are changing, as they're changing, and it'll give you a chance to nip little problems in the bud before they become big ones.

One problem with using real-time search features to track your brand is that sometimes there's a LOT of information for you to process; it's cheap, yes, but if it's taking up all of your time, just keeping track of what people are saying about your brand, it's not really that cheap in the long run.

2) Twitter Keyword Email Digests

Third-party Twitter services like TweetLater have "keyword digest" features which collect all of the tweets containing a particular keyword throughout the day and then email them to you all at once; this can be significantly easier than doing real-time search monitoring if your brand, product or service is being discussed extensively on Twitter, or if it's being discussed globally and you just don't have the time to be monitoring it 24/7. TweetLater's keyword digest feature is supported by some light advertising, but that means it's free to you - so you won't have to justify the expense to your procurement people.

Unless you're a big company (or unless your company takes Twitter very, very seriously), you'll do well to avoid third-party "monitoring" services that claim to do all of this legwork for you. Some of them are pretty expensive, and when you boil down the services that these companies offer down, basically, they're just reading tweets containing your brand's name, and summarizing the content of those tweets - not worth the often hefty price tag that's attached to these services.

There are rumors in the works that Twitter is going to start offering an in-house brand tracking service to companies this year or next year as part of its plan to monetize - if that's true, it's likely going to blow the house down on other third-party tracking services and leave them in the dust. If you're considering paying a company to monitor your brand on Twitter for you, your best choice might be to wait to see whether Twitter will be offering the service themselves and just go straight to the source.

Once you've got your Twitter brand monitoring in place, of course, you're facing a much more complicated question - what to do with the information that you're receiving about your brand. The recent defamation lawsuit filed by a property management company against a tenant who posted a tweet about unsatisfactory service is a perfect example of what NOT to do with customer feedback. In that particular case, the tenant posted a Tweet saying that the company had failed to deal with her mold problem in a timely fashion; rather than take this information to heart, and recognize that they'd dropped the ball, the company instead chose to sue the tenant for $50,000 for "defamation of character," ironically severely damaging their own brand in the process. Now users around the world see that this particular company would rather sue its customers when they complain than do something about the problems their customers are having. That poor decision reflects a profound misunderstanding of how to handle Twitter feedback on the part of the property management company, and that misunderstanding is happening in real-time, in front of the eyes of millions of users.

The right thing for the property management company to have done, in my humble opinion, would have been to post an @reply to the tenant in question (not a private message, which would only be visible by her, but an @reply so that everybody else can read it too), letting her know that they're sorry about the mold problem and that they'll be fixing it as soon as possible. That would have sent the right message to other potential customers that the company takes their tenants (and Twitter) seriously and that they respond to complaints quickly and reasonably.

What you choose to do with after you start to monitor your brand, product or service on Twitter is up to you - but now you've got a few ideas about how to start tracking that information on Twitter; if you readers have thought of any other methods that work for you, let us know!