Lurkers Needed. Apply within. Have you ever seen an ad like that? No one invites lurkers to a job interview, to a party, or to a blog. Most bloggers want you to participate, to take something away certainly, and to give something back.

So why monitor? Let's be clear: If you don't know what people are saying about your company, you are at an incredible disadvantage.

Marketing needs to monitor for only one reason: To participate. That means responding to real or imagined issues in blogs or forums. That means proactively sharing ideas in the right blogs or communities, or your company and brands will potentially suffer.

1. Set monitoring goals

Determine how monitoring is important to your company. Your goal is to keep focused on just one area, to start. If you set 225 Google Alerts with all the keywords you used in your last pay-per-click campaign, you are going to bury yourself in information that you won't be able to use. Start slowly, hire an analyst or contractor, and as Dory says in Finding Nemo, "Just keep swimming."

2. Research your keywords and meta tags

Look at the tags and keywords your website uses to position itself. Pick two or three.

If you don't know what keywords or tags are in use at your company, ask your tech team. If you don't want to ask your tech team, simply go to www.iwebtool.com/metatags_extractor and key in your web address. It will give you a report of all the keywords/meta-tags on the page. If it comes up blank, ask your tech team to show them to you.

If they don't exist, that could be job one. The search engines are missing you altogether.

3. He said, she said: Are your customers talking about you?

Set up a Google Alert so that every day, or as it happens, you get an email that shows you who is talking about that keyword (which can be your product or brand name). The challenge with simply using a tool like Google or Technorati Watchlist is the sheer volume of information. You need to either task people with manual assessment or use better tools (many of which are paid services) or contract with an outside provider.

An alternative to Alerts, which hit your email inbox, is to setup an RSS Reader (Google, Bloglines, etc). Then you can check it as needed, versus filling your email inbox to the brim. The risk with an RSS Reader, though, is that you don't look often enough.

4. Take a pulse—free

This is such an awesome tool that it deserves its own bullet point. Try www.BlogPulse.co (a service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics). This is one of my favorite tools. It has a conversation tracker, a visual trends component, and the Blogger Profile (in beta), which allows you to learn about a particular blogger if that person is indexed (you can self-submit, too). All of it is free.