PepsiCo, producer of Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice, recently replaced their iconic packaging (the orange with the straw) with a glass of orange juice. While a seemingly small change in the company’s brand,  loyal Tropicana orange juice drinkers immediately responded and expressed their disdain for the new packaging. They emailed, tweeted, blogged etc, their complaints with the new logo.  In effort to appease their angered consumer base, PepsiCo quickly reverted to the old logo.

The Tropicana orange juice debacle clearly illustrates how important it is for companies to involve their existing consumer base in brand -related decisions. Rather than being retroactive by changing the product after the backlash, Tropicana should have taken into account the opinion of the buyer. In doing so, Tropicana would have not only avoided the backlash but also established a stronger relationship with customers.

While, Tropicana solicited professional logo design advice, in the end it was the customer who had the last say. By hearing and responding, Tropicana did ease upset customers. However; had they involved their loyal customers in the process in the first place, the whole situation could have been avoided.

The situation has further proven the point that you are not your brand-your customers are. Without them, you’re nothing.

With so much of the content published daily on the web, keeping tabs on your company, industry, and your competitors can seem like an exhausting task. But never fear; there are more resources available to help you stalk your scene than you count on a full set of fingers and toes.

Here’s a list of just some of the tools you need to stay on top of things and enter the conversation early on, before things get out of hand:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You can choose to receive daily, weekly, or “as it happens” updates whenever your topic is mentioned.

Yahoo! Pipes is a big, fat, wide-reaching net of social media searches to alert you every time your brand or product is mentioned by anybody on a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc.

Tweet Scan is a real-time search engine for Twitter. Tweet Scan indexes all public messages so you can find the conversations, people, and tweets you want. You can search by keyword or author with results available via email, RSS, and Twhirl.