Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a unit of media researcher Nielsen, has tools to mine what it calls customer-generated media--the opinions and preferences people express online. Marketing consultant Andy Beal, who runs the Marketing Pilgrim site, has several ideas for tracking what Internet users are saying about your company, including tips on monitoring blog conversations and social media sites such as Technorati.

As in so much regarding online retail, Amazon is the granddaddy in customer reviews. But customers can chat and review products at sites ranging from discounter Lillian Vernon to luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz.

Twenty-two percent of retail sites now provide online chat, compared to 12% of sites across industries, says The Customer Respect Group, a research and consulting firm that helps companies improve their treatment of customers online.

Gaining traction, the group says, is "proactive chat," where visitors are invited to converse based on their online behavior. For instance, features such as "click to call a customer service agent" can help companies limit site -- and shopping cart&emdash;abandonment.

Besides, block discussion at your site and you know people will talk elsewhere.

Protect while you serve

With all this interactivity comes data. Lots and lots of data for and about customers. IT managers must help steer internal discussions with marketing, legal and sales departments about whether and how to collect, triangulate, analyze&emdash;and most importantly, protect&emdash;such information. Privacy lapses repel customers. Yet there are no federal data breach laws with which companies can comply; the regulations differ state to state.

This means that IT managers in all industries, not just retail, must batten down networking infrastructure. Healthcare and insurance companies, for example, must guard personal data even while opening up some internal files to customers who want to choose and change benefits online, as well as review medical data about themselves.

Senior IT managers also have to take their heads out of the technology so they can learn how information flows through their companies, says Tom Bowers, managing director of the consulting firm Security Constructs and a former chief security officer at a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company.

Bowers says, for example, that CIOs should study how customers and employees use e-mail, Web mail and chat forums to share information. Doing so, he notes, is the only way to understand where security policies fall down in the real world.

"CEOs don't want to be on Larry King Live explaining a breach," he says.

And CIOs don't want their employers to join companies such as TJX, Monster.com and The Nature Conservancy, all of which made our list of the most egregious data breaches of the year.