Cameron Olthuis offers a good list of things to monitor to track the buzz going on regarding your brand.

1. Company name
2. Company URL
3. Public facing figures
4. Product names
5. Product URLs
6. The industry “hang outs”
7. Employee activity/blogs
8. Conversations
9. Brand image
10. Competitors

And then Jeremiah Owyang adds 7 more to the list:

1. Images/Videos (I also say podcasts)
2. Tags in social search tools
3. Social voting tools
4. Have your product teams monitor their product's buzz
5. Create a feedback mechanism
6. Log it all in a database
7. Hire someone to monitor all of this

Of course, you can save searches on www.live.com that return results for just News, Images, Feeds (blogs), or the entire web. That's how I monitor some of the buzz for brands I'm interested in.