Brand monitoring is an ongoing watch on the names and phrases that represent you: legal names, products, campaigns, and often executives. It is a subset of listening with a reputation bias.
Separate streams. A product outage and a CEO interview should not live in one undifferentiated pile. If your tool cannot split them, your reports will blur them.
Decide in advance what “unusual” means: a percentage jump in volume, a jump in negative share, a new topic cluster, or coverage in a source type you rarely see. Alerts without definitions become noise, then get muted.
Do not confuse monitoring with control. You cannot delete the public internet. You can shorten the time between signal and a brief that legal, comms and leadership can use.
Review queries quarterly. Campaigns end. Nicknames appear. Competitors rebrand. A stale query is how teams miss the story that actually shipped.