A Note from Executive Editor Brad Berens: I'm very pleased to welcome Tom Hespos as a weekly iMedia columnist. Watch for him every Thursday.

Companies of all stripes are beginning to embrace a new way of connecting with customers that stands in stark contrast to the top-down marketing methods of the past. Conversational Marketing, as we call it, involves speaking directly with the market in online forums like blogs, message boards, discussion lists and other two-way media.

It takes significant effort to get on board with Conversational Marketing, and one of the first steps in the process is a commitment to listen to what people are saying about your brand, products, customer service and your category in general. That's a tough task, considering comments can be posted all over the internet, and there's no reliable way to pick up everything that's being said about you. That said, there are a number of ways that technology can help us to listen effectively.

First, let's try an experiment…
If you don't already have an RSS reader on your machine, go download one. I find the Sage plugin works rather well for Firefox users. If that doesn't work for you, try Feedreader or whatever your favorite tech nerd recommends.

Now, do a search for your brand name on any or all of the following blog search engines: Google Blog Search, Feedster, IceRocket, Sphere and TagFetch.

Notice that when your search results are returned, you're afforded the opportunity to subscribe to an RSS feed? Do it. Once the feed is added to your reader, you'll be able to monitor mentions of your brand name in the blogosphere, and you'll get new results whenever you update your feeds. Obviously, no search engine picks up everything, so the more search feeds you subscribe to the less likely you are to miss something important.

As you wade through the individual posts on blogs large and small, you'll notice things that are important (such as individual testimonials regarding your customer service) and things that are not so important (mentions of your brand on spam blogs or "splogs" for short).

The purpose of this experiment is simply to show you two important things.
One, that people are out there discussing your company and its products whether you're participating in the discussion or not. And two, that the opportunities to engage customers and potential customers are both numerous and distributed.

Even if you delete these search feeds and never look at them again, take away the knowledge that your brand is not just being discussed out there in the mainstream media, but also all over the internet. Conversational Marketing is all about becoming aware of conversations like these, and participating in them meaningfully.

"But how do I keep track of all these snippets of conversation all over the Internet?" you might ask. After all, if you've participated in the experiment, you've seen just a small slice of the comments in the blogosphere. There are a lot more out there on blogs, and then there are message boards, newsgroups, discussion lists and a lot of other channels to contend with.

Thankfully, technology is beginning to come to the rescue.
There are a number of companies that want to help you keep track of conversations.

One such company is Cymfony, which uses a platform known as Orchestra to process discussions on blogs, consumer review sites, USENET newsgroups and more. Orchestra uses natural language processing and data cleansing (despamming and de-duping), among other things, to provide a clean database of relevant conversations for its clients. The natural language processing can be quite helpful if, for instance, you work on Quaker Oats and you need an application that's intelligent enough to discern between posts about Quaker the brand and posts about The Quakers, a religious movement.

One might also keep an eye on Technorati and its developer program. Technorati achieved an early lead in blog search, and it's not unreasonable to expect that something could come out of the company or its developer program that could help companies keep track of relevant online conversations. One project on SourceForge involves pulling Technorati data to find blogs linking to a specific URL. This information might be useful for marketers hoping to find out what the market thinks of recent initiatives or announcements.

I also wouldn't count out companies that have played in the press clipping or public relations space, either. That would include PR agencies and interactive agencies, some of which have developed their own tools for managing conversations.

The important thing to be cognizant of, however, is the ability of these companies and their applications to point to relevant conversations and to help companies manage their participation in those conversations. There are a great number of companies that provide a 10,000 foot view of overall "buzz" about products and companies. However, these companies may or may not be good at helping people zero in on individual comments and contribute to the conversation meaningfully.

Now that you have an idea of the magnitude of conversation concerning your company, it's time to start thinking about what to do about it.

I'll be contributing some ideas here at iMedia Connection in the very near future.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.