9 FREE Tools to Track Online Conversations about your Brand

There is an old trick about finding out who’s pissed off by your products or service, just go to Google and search “your brand name sucks” and you would find out.

To many people, iPhone is a good product, even for those who haven’t got the opportunity to own one (like me). If someone is not satisfied about iPhone, what about your brand?

Tools to Watch Online Conversations

Watching online conversations is definitely a must-do task for online marketing managers. Here are eleven free tools you can try out to help you identify the “good” and “bad” about your brand so as to manage your online reputation properly.

To manage your online reputation, you need to have a timely understanding of who and where your brand is being talked about. I’ve compiled a list of free tools you can use to help manage your online reputation.

Google Alerts: a powerful online conversation tracker

Enter your brand or product names in the “search terms” to receive email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of topic.Read also: 7 Google Alerts Tips For Your Business.

Twitter: watch your reputation in real time

Twitter is a great tool for real time search. Use the advanced search so that you get the most accurate results possible. Once you see the search results, you can use the “subscribe” button on top right menu to receive the update via feed readers. If you are new to feed reader, Google reader is a good start.
BuzzMonitor. The World Bank conceives and sponsors a open source aggregator, “BuzzMonitor” which also helps you track the buzz about your brand, products or service in the Internet.

Friendfeed

friendfeed is a service that aggregated your feeds from different online services and you can share with friends. You can subscribe to the search results as well. If in your countries, it’s not that popular, you can ignore this service. Give it a try first.

Blogpulse: track conversations in blogs

Watch the conversation in the blogsphere with blogpulse. BlogPulse tracks conversations by indexing the full content of weblog posts. First, BlogPulse technology crawls the blog, and then it segments the blog into individual posts and identifies permalinks. The search results show not only the blog content with bolded terms:

the most interesting part is, you can track the conversations and view the blog profile.  When a blogger publishes a post and other bloggers link to it, the original post ( or “seed”) becomes part of a conversation. What happens next is fascinating. From those seeds sprout other links, and so and and so on, until it creates an entire conversation. The nodes of the graph are posts and the arcs of the graph are permalink citations from post to post.

Technorati

Technorati is another handy tool you can use to watch blog conversations about your brand or product.It shows the blog authority in the results. You can subscribe to receive updates via RSS.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog.

Boardtracker: monitor forum conversations

Discussion boards and forums are still popular especially in some Asian countries. You can track the conversations in forums with boardtracker. You can pre-define search terms and preferences and BoardTracker will notify you in a number of ways (email, Jabber, Site) as soon as a thread matching your search term is posted on any of the thousands of forums they track. To me, this tool is not quite good if Asian market is of your concern.

Social Mention: Like Google Alerts but for social media.

Social mention is one of my favorite. It allows you to not only subscribe by RSS or Email but also provides CSV/Excel export (sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags).

Sentiment is the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative.

It shows several interesting figures such as strength, sentiment, passion, reach, the number of minutes per mention, the number of unique authors and retweets, post rank, and sources. With social mention, you can watch the conversations on blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, news, and more.

Who’s Talkin

Who’s Talkin monitors conversations in blogs, news, social networks, videos, images, forums, and tags. I like the interface but unfortunately, the RSS subscription is not available yet.

Read also: 10 Excellent Online Tools to Identify Trends