brand management

Monitoring, tracking, and responding to what others are writing about your company online is a relatively inexpensive and very effective strategy for building your brand's online reputation. It is an excellent way to learn about your customers, respond to issues before they get out of control, and generate customer loyalty that translates into increased sales.

The following free tools will help you stay on top of the conversation surrounding your business.

Google.com/alerts - Simply enter a search term, choose a "comprehensive" alert, choose how often you'd like it delivered, then enter your email address. You will receive updates every time any content with your keywords enters the GoogleSphere. This service will be even more useful when Google adds alert delivery via RSS.

Technorati.com - Technorati is the largest blog search engine. Add your RSS enabled website to Technorati and it will track other sites that link to you yours and add your blog to the Technorati network.

Backtype.com - This service does a scarily good job of tracking comments across the blogosphere. Type your name in to see all those pithy remarks you've made over the years. Type in your company's name to find out what people really think of your products and services.

Boardtracker.com - Indexes and tracks discussion board postings. Discussion boards were the original social media sites long before Facebook or MySpace existed. They often have a large, focused, and passionate user bases. If you want to have conversations with potential customers that care about what you do, then find and join the top discussion boards for your industry or area of interest.

Search.twitter.com - Twitter is of course the incredibly wonderful/annoying service that lets you update the world about every little thing that you do. While you may not use Twitter extensively, you will want to know if someone is twittering about your company, so try a search to see what comes up.

Yahoo Pipes - Yahoo Pipes allows users to get/pipe information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be filtered. Try searching for pipes that other users have built like the Social Media Firehose. You can modify existing pipes or create your own unique pipe to get your data just the way you want it.

Over the past few years marketers have focused on content creation as the primary means of "participation" in online communities. We've all been busy writing blogs, sending emails, building online communities, twittering, etc.. However, we would do well to take the time to seriously listen to our customers. Hopefully, these tools help.