You hear it all the time now. “You don’t own your brand story, your customers do.”

Actually, they don’t even have to be your customers. Anyone online or off who has congratulations to give or an axe to grind is in control of your story. So how do you insure the health and fitness of the brand story you’ve toiled over to make pure and true?

I met a guy who has an electrocardiogram (EKG) of sorts for brand storytelling. His name is Josh Ginsberg, and he is the founder of Zignal Labs. They offer a “real-time cross media analytics platform that helps clients quickly spot trends, see relevant stories unfold, and take action.”

Josh is my guest on this episode of Business of Story podcast. And to keep our story straight, Zignal Labs is also a sponsor of our show. This is a fascinating interview for brand strategists and content marketers, because Ginsberg takes us behind the scenes of one of the most robust story monitoring systems on the web and why it’s important to keep tabs on your brand story.

For instance, here are some of the metrics Zignal Labs captured from last night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas.  They began by setting the stage for the #DemDebate story:

“Support for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has been growing steadily, but its unclear whether that support will translate into votes. Over the last month, he has topped frontrunner Hillary Clinton across social media. This chart shows the last month’s worth of mentions of the two candidates on Twitter.”

But across traditional media, Clinton is mentioned almost twice as frequently as her chief Democratic rival:

Here’s a state by state breakdown of Twitter mentions by volume, comparing Sanders and Clinton over the first 15 minutes of the debate.  Sanders continued to enjoy a social media advantage over the former Secretary of State.

A later map showed how Twitter exploded with Bernie Sanders mentions after he addressed the question of whether or not he was a socialist. Within 10 minutes, Sanders went from owning about 1/3 of the Twitter conversation to 62% compared to Clinton.

This is a big moment for Sanders, who after weeks of building strength and drawing large crowds to campaign events gets his shot in the prime-time TV spotlight. We see signs of Sanders’ continuing strength in this real-time word cloud tracking all Tweets mentioning the hashtag #DemDebate.

More than 2.2 million mentions we tracked during the two-hour Democratic debate. This graph shows the breakdown of mentions for each of the five candidates.

And here’s what Zignal captured on the most written and Tweeted about issues during the debate.

This last graph is interesting for me because it rates what Americans seem to care most about at this time. I’m shocked that Anderson Cooper actually got more love than climate change. Or maybe I’m not.

Listen to the creator of this storytelling EKG on Business of Story, and learn how you can track the health of your brand stories online and off.

(This post originally appeared on LinkedIN)