Recently, the FDA put a major pharmaceutical company’s Facebook page on notice. The issues was that sharing the information on the page did not include enough information on the drug, indication for use, and possible side effects to meet FDA requirements for promotion of one of the company’s drugs.

Big Picture: No matter what the industry – highly regulated or not – knowing and following the rules when it comes to posting and sharing promotional information on social media sites is critical to maintaining a good reputation online.

Having worked with companies in a variety of industries, I know how easily oversights can occur when addressing new communication channels.  Having someone on hand to help guide your company through possible landmines such as the one faced above can go a long way to protecting against these issues.

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With the amount of content being posted on the Internet every day (20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute) how do you keep track of your brand across the entire web?

If your brand is small enough, Google Alerts may be able to help. Setting up alerts for when your brands, key members of the company, or specific products are mentioned allows an automated e-mail to be sent to you. But there is one hitch with this method, someone needs to wade through all those e-mails to determine which ones are relevant, require action, or are unrelated.

There are online services that will aggregate chatter about your company. Often displaying such information as sentiment, key influencers, and volume of conversation in easy to use dashboards. This is a great option for companies with the money to invest in this type of solution. And there are many vendors out their to choose from.

No matter how you decide to monitor online conversation, there is a cost associated with it. Time, money, and resources must be allocated in a reasonable way to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your online conversation monitoring.