Monitoring your brand, your market, your competitors

These days its easier than ever to monitor your brand or market and run your own “clippings” service.  Of course there are many companies that will charge you for this, and no doubt they provide a great service and also filter the results, but there  are a few  simple things you can do using these sites:

• Google New Alerts  - By setting up news alerts on Google you get email alerts (or even an RSS feed) for breaking news from Google. Easy to set up.
• Change Detection.com – A great FREE service that allows you to monitor another web page for changes and alert you (by email or RSS). Great for keeping track of competitors or news pages. It can get a bit much sometimes as you can get spurious alerts, but very useful nevertheless.
• tweetbeep.com – set up email alerts based on your company / brand name appearing on twitter.
• trackur.com – not free but a great tool for monitoring your brand online. Importantly – it works!
• backtype.com – Monitor  in real time, keyword mentions or comments – get email alerts
• Trendrr.com – monitor keywords across numerous sites. free and paid options. Nice Embeddable graphs.
• monitter.com – Nice real time monitoring of twitter
• howsociable.com – check your sociability across a bunch of social sites

Some more useful resources here

A great list of Buzz Monitoring sites and tools here http://wiki.kenburbary.com/social-meda-monitoring-wiki

Another List of free (or nearly) tools here:

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/12/near-free-social-media-monitoring/