I think that often times in traditional marketing there is a stigma against openly admitting that you’re monitoring your brand, your name and your industry in conversation. But in social media, it’s more than acceptable to eavesdrop on the conversations that may be relative to you. We call it monitoring. 
And, in our world, it’s perfectly acceptable to set up a platform to monitor the conversations taking place that either (A) involve your brand or your company or (B) involve your industry and provide you with an opportunity to offer up value. Here are three tools that we love to use for monitoring online conversations. And, best of all, they are free!
Google Alerts – If you’re not using Google Alerts to monitor your brand then stop reading this, open a new tab and set them up! It’s free, it’s easy and it’s completely comprehensive. Choose to have Google notify you of mentions either as they happen, daily or weekly. You can choose to review only the best or all of the content and you can choose what media to monitor: News, Blogs, Video, Discussion or All.
Search.Twitter.Com – This search tool allows you to run Twitter searches for keywords and target them by location. So, if you want to know who’s talking about your brand in the 70130 area code you can search: FSC Interactive near:70130. It’s a great way to see who is talking about your brand or about your industry and service. Plus, it allows you to find people that are similar to you that you might not yet be connected with. Geo-location has to be one-word, so you can’t search “New Orleans” but you can search by any state or city that is one word and by zip code.
Topsy – Probably my favorite social monitoring tool, Topsy gives you a breakdown of who is saying what and what platforms people are using. Choose from Photos, Videos, Tweets, Web and “Experts.” You can also monitor by Network, including Google Plus mentions. What I love about Topsy is that it will allow you to search within a time frame and give you a breakdown of the volume of that keyword in a graph (on right).
So, there you have it. Three free and easy ways to monitor what’s being said about your brand online.