It seems to me that PR pro and marketers now have in their hands great tools to track what is being said about their brand in the online world. Ok, the technology is everything but new, but it's now so easy to use for anyone who takes the time to understand the way it goes that it would be so sad not to get use to them.
Seting up a RSS feed thanks to Feedster, PubSub or that kind of tools is dead easy and brings a lot's of help to follow what is being said on a specific topic or brand.
Nevertheless, I have to say we our far away from the common use of those tools in France that still seem to be in the hands of bloggers only... Don't even imagine to talk about "tags" or "taging conversations", only few will understand.
Most of the time, if marketers know what RSS is about, they see it in it's more common use, syndication of information coming from a blog or say a web page, not like a channel that might be use to share so many different kind of informations that might also not be coming directly from a single web page...
However, RSS makes information so quickly available it should be used by every PR/marcom ... To track or to spread information. It happened several times with some of my clients in the past months that informations poped up in the blogosphere at at time where the official press release was still on progress... Thanks to my RSS feeds tracking subscription, I've been able to see it quite in real time, and to ring the bell at the Corp. headquarters, helping things move quicker by this way. The last two times it happend, I was the only PR blogger in the international team, and the first able to react... So isn't this an added value ?
In our world lead by information, I think it is essential to follow what is being said in the online world, we now have the chance to see so many tools poping up day after day to help us monitore trends, topics, issues, it would be a real mistake not to integrate them seriously in our daily work.

Again, PR pro and marketers should be in my opinion the first to understand and use those tools, unfortunately, if you heard about the last PR inepsy, you'll see that our industry is definitely not  up to date...