by Jason Baer ( http://www.convinceandconvert.com )
Social Mention is a free Web site that monitors and organizes social media chatter on Twitter, blogs, discussion forums, and elsewhere. Social Mention is not nearly as powerful or customizable as paid social media monitoring software like Radian6, Scoutlabs, or Spiral16, but it’s free and easy to use.
Once you launch your social media program, you may want to investigate paid social monitoring software to alert you to opportunities, keep closer tabs on the competition, find influencers in your industry, etc. Nearly all companies in the social software business offer free trials. While I recommend the three above, a good list of all the social listening software providers is at http://wiki.kenburbary.com
Online, are people talking more about your company, or your competitors? Let’s find out.
1. Search for Yourself
Go to http://www.socialmention.com. Click “all” on the row of tabs. Then, enter your organization’s name in quotes (“organization name”) and click search. The quotes will ensure that results include only exact, relevant matches.
It may take a few seconds for Social Mention to produce results, as it has to scan a lot of data.
On the results page, you’ll see at the top the number of total mentions of your organization in social media over the past 30 days. (You can change the date range with the pull-down that says “anytime”. The default is 30 days, and Social Mention only stores 30 days worth of data).
Look through the search results to find areas where your organization is being mentioned, by whom, and in what context. It may be easier to scan results by sorting them by Source. Use the “Sort by” pull-down to make that change.
Mike Dickman 