Do you know what is being said about you, your brand or your company online? Judging by the response I get from people - individuals and companies - I already know the answer.......and it is invariably no!

Many people don't actually seem to bothered either!

The world of social media has changed the playing field for brands and companies. Before the advent of social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, anything said about a brand, a product, a company, a company's recruitment process or interview procedures etc would be kept to (literal) word of mouth. Now the same news - whether good or bad - can spread virally quicker than you can ever imagine.

The good news is that you are now able to track what is said, giving you the chance to take the plaudits for the good stuff and deal directly with all the bad stuff that is being said about you, your brand or your company.

There are some SUPERB free tools that you can be using to do this. Here are my top 10 social media monitoring tools that you would be 'very silly' not to start using:

1. Google Alerts
   These are an absolute basic minimum, that everyone should be doing. Set up a Google account and set up some Alerts, for you, your brand, your company or any keywords you want to track. As soon as it is mentioned on the web Google will tell you about it with an email to your inbox!
2. Tweetdeck
   If you are a Twitter user, then this is an absolute must. The ability to track real-time what is being said about whatever you choose, is very powerful indeed. It is easy to use and set up, and it will even play you a sound when someone has mentioned you!
3. Addictomatic
   This is just superb, and also fun to use. Put in a simple search, and it will show the results in a page full of widget type boxes across a whole range of platforms - video, blogs, networks, search networks etc. Love this!!
4. BoardReader
   Now this is a novel site. It lets you monitor discussion groups and forums. This is great for knowing when a new group or discussion begins about you, your company or your brand.
5. Backtype
   This is a real time conversational search.They index and connect online conversations from across the web in real-time, so you can see what people are saying about topics that interest you.
6. BackTweet
   Brilliant at monitoring when your tweets (on Twitter) have been shared - or re-tweeted.
7. Filtrbox
   See what others are saying about your company in real-time on Twitter, social networks, blogs and thousands of online news outlets. There is a cost attached here, but they will give you 15 days free as a starter which is worthing doing just for starters.
8. SocialMention
   Nice! Just like Google alerts, but for social media instead. It does produce different results as well!
9. IceRocket
   Like some of the others here, it searches across anumber of different social media platforms across the web
10. Twittersearch
    The superb search engine of real time info on Twitter. Search your topic, and set up the RSS feed for the results to flood into your RSS Reader. It only searches Twitter, but that is where the real time conversations are happening!!

These are my current favourites. What about you? What others out there are you using? I would love to hear about them.

(Obviously there are the big daddies of this space like Radion6 and Meltwater, but I will look at those another day.)

Posted originally on my blog, SironaSays