People keep asking me how you can know what happens in the social web? Well, with listening it. Here’s some monitoring tools you may want to check out. Some of them are free, some chargeable. I haven’t tried them all, so don’t sue me, if they suck. 😉 And post your own favorite here if you have one.
The Chargeables
http://www.swixhq.com/SWIX.html
The Free Side
For my current needs I basically use a combination of a couple of tools like Hootsuite, Google Alerts, co.mments and Google Reader (although I use NetNewsWire for RSS as it is quicker to fly through them if you’re in a hurry) + a couple of other gimmicks as well, for example sucking RSS searches from some of the services mentioned in the Free Side above.
Currently I just haven’t found it meaningful to get those chargeable ones because with an inventive mind and with a support of great services like Hootsuite you can manage pretty far.
But if you’re interested in seeing what the world has to offer, at least check out these in the post and here’s a basic post of the topic on Mashable: Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation and if you’re interested to learn more about these issues you may want to check out an artice about Social Media Monitoring: Critical for Business Success.
markoteras.com 
Hi Marko,
thank you for your post! I wanted to remind you that there are also Finnish media monitoring companies like M-Brain or Whitevector.
M-Brain is developing new semantic monitoring tool M-Adaptive. We are going into beta testing soon. If you want know more about M-Brain or M-Adaptive, please contact me!
Taru-Maija Ruuskanen
Marketing Manager, M-Brain Oy
Thanks for sharing Taru-Maija! And good luck for the beta tests.
Another company with a popular social media monitoring service is Sysomos, which offers Heartbeat. Heartbeat features automated sentiment, geo-demographics, workflow management and integration with Salesforce.com. More details are here: http://sysomos.com/products/overview/heartbeat
cheers, Mark
Mark Evans
Director of Communications
Sysomos Inc.
Hi Marko,
May I suggest the Sysomos products, MAP and Heartbeat. For social media monitoring in particular, Heartbeat is something our clients love. You can find more information about us below and we are always happy to show a demo.
http://www.sysomos.com/products/overview/heartbeat
Marko,
Agree completely with your comment on the paid brand monitoring tools.
Unless you are a brand or enterprise that has both the need and the resources to manage and react on a granular basis, a mash-up of the free tools will serve most of your needs just fine.
Thanks for commenting Ken!
What I’d also like to see more is that businesses would understand monitoring as a tool of learning about their own sector, not as just “listening if they talk something bad about us”. It’s also a competition benefit.
Hey Marko….just saw your post. tought I’d share mine as well. Made one on Free monitoring tools:
http://www.social-brand-value.com/2010/05/31/free-social-media-monitoring-tools-list/
Cheers
danile
Thanks for sharing Danie! Seems like a decent list. 🙂
Pingback: Knowledge + Software + Right actions = Success « Marko Teräs – Reasonings
Can anyone recommend a social media monitoring tool for monitoring the forum comments regarding my small business clients? Ideally something like a Google Alerts that gets automatically emailed to me every time my clients name is mentioned. I already use google alerts but it doesn’t seem to pick up the smaller forums or deeper threads, which can have a lot of hot topics going on about my client. Thanks for your help!