It's easy to get bogged down in the hype surrounding social media.

But if you can get past the hype, there are some very practical uses for collaboration with customers, partners, and employees. Notice the use of the term collaboration and not social media. Social media is type of collaboration that takes place within groups.

One of the most beneficial uses of collaboration is to monitor the perception of your brand or service.

Dell's brand is mentioned nearly 5,000 times a day. That number includes mentions within Dell's community, in external communities like Facebook and Twitter, and via other media outlets.

Now consider the following industry statistics:

• 77 percent of people trust family and friends above retailers
• People are three times more likely to trust peers over advertising
• 83 percent of the population participates in some form of social media

Couple these facts with the importance of brand monitoring, and you have a recipe for a huge success or a massive disaster.

Perceptions within social media quickly define a brand and shape the customer expectations. Social technologies enable your message to spread faster than ever, but it also means that managing your message is more difficult than ever. This is due in part to the fact that you no longer have complete autonomy over your brand perception.

The good news? There are now more ways than ever to monitor your brand. Companies like Telligent, Radian6, and Nielsen provide tools for tracking brand mentions and analyzing the sentiment.

This means that you can monitor communities like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; competitors' sites; news outlets; and virtually any other source to find mentions of topics and keywords that are important to you. This provides you that ability to quickly understand and act on those mentions, correcting inaccuracies or heralding great stories.

There are two distinct ways that your brand and keywords can be monitored and analyzed:
• External Listening - Broad monitoring for keywords
• Internal Analysis - Focused monitoring in communities you own

Both monitoring capabilities are a necessity, but there are very distinct roles that each plays.

You can think of the difference in the following way.

Publicly traded companies are required to provide financial disclosure information through quarterly reports. This information is then analyzed and scrutinized by a variety of tools, like Yahoo Finance. Investors then use this data to make financial decisions. This is like external monitoring. You can access the information but only a limited set of the data.

By measuring conversations on external sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, you can identify shifts in brand popularity and sentiment. Know who is saying what, and where they are engaged.

Internally, organizations use complex financial modeling and forecasting tools based on real-time information. This is like internal analytics. Access to the information and feedback can be correlated with user information from CRM systems and other customer management tools to provide more information around who is saying what.

Monitoring your own communities is just as vital. Drilling deep and mining data about your users will help you improve your customer support efficiency and proving the value of your online communities.

A critical part of a successful online community is being able to easily identify under-performing areas. Key performance indicators like time-to-solution, answer rates, most viewed documentation pages, and most popular downloads provide you with actionable insights to deliver on your support commitments.

In order to be successful, organizations must understand user engagement both inside and outside of their communities. By measuring "brand buzz" and monitoring sentiment, you will gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of your brand in the marketplace.