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

• SpyFu -  Just enter  the site name, and SpyFu tells you what keywords and adwords are they targeting and buying? How are they performing? What positions are the most competitive? What are the results?

• SocialMention -  daily email alerts of your chosen keywords or competitor.  Includes exporting options too.

• LinkedIn -  of course.

• BoardTracker – track what’s being said on forums. Also BoardReader.

• copernic.com - A tool that looks for new content on your competitors’ web pages.  Get an e-mail when a page changes – check for new jobs etc –  iPhone / iPad options.

• Twitter – of course, follow those that you are interested in.

• Twitter Search - Advanced search feature give even more options.

• Wikipedia – see what’s written about a company or product.

• Slideshare – are any of your competitors presenting at a conference? What are they presenting about?

• Google Finance:  Useful competitor intelligence for  publicly listed companies.

• YouTube - Subscribe to YouTube channels of your competitors

• Collecta:  Whats happening now – What’s being talked about?

• CI Radar: Gathers key intelligence about companies , customers, employees,  developments, threats and vulnerabilities.

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/