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Wake up!  Customers, prospects and even competitors are talking right now about your company to their friends, to their peers, or to virtually anybody who will listen.  Good, bad and sometimes ugly, consumers are using every means at their social-media disposal to compliment, question or rant about their interactions with your brand. But are companies listening to what they’re saying? Sadly, that answer appears to be “not very much.”

Only 13% of CMO Council survey respondents indicated their companies have deployed any real-time systems to monitor, collect and analyze online conversations about their brands. In other words, there’s not a lot of listening going on.

Yet brands big and small, such as Wells Fargo, Dell, JetBlue, Starbucks and others – are actively encouraging comments and gleaning insights from conversations taking place on message boards, blogs, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Early adopters are actively listening and responding to customer questions, providing information about new services, and seeking input that informs new- product development.

In turn, consumers are flocking the Web to share advice, information, and to sound off about their experiences with a brand. Look at this exchange about JetBlue on Twitter:

“I want to make love to the @jetblue terminal,” tweeted a customer earlier this month.

@jetblue quickly replied: “Goodness…I hope you at least buy the terminal dinner first!”

JetBlue’s reply to this tweet is a great example of a company that understands social media, listens and responds “on brand.”

But what about all those other interactions to go unnoticed, or worse, get read but not responded to because management doesn’t want to (or understand how to) engage in online dialogue. “What if we blog and someone comments about us, do we have to respond?” is a question I heard from a CEO recently.

Where to start? Here are steps to get you going:

• Start the conversation internally about role of social media in your marketing mix and customer delivery channels. How can social media enable that?
• Next, as fast as you can, listen to what consumers are saying about your company. As fast as Twitter and Facebook are growing, so too are tools to help companies monitor, respond and engage in the discussions.
• Research monitoring tools, and use the free ones right now and demo some of the fee-based applications. MarketingProfs has a good summary of some of the top free and fee-based tools; a quick online search for “social media listening platforms” will yield all sorts of other options.
• Research how other companies are engaging (not just selling) with consumers through social media.
• Monitor your competitors to see what’s being said about them and how they are addressing feedback.
• Internally, address when and how you will monitor, respond, engage and share what you’re hearing across your business lines.

In other words, “listen up!” You’ll be glad you did. And so will your customers.