Listening to your audience, customers and potential customers is critical in the world of Social Media.

I see two critical questions for companies.

1. As an organization are you listening? If you have customers, most likely they’re talking about you to their friends, colleagues, and to anyone else who will listen and is in their sphere of influence.
2. Do you have a plan / strategy for Social Media? The business benefits of social media are still debatable depending on your market.  However, it’s where the eyeballs are and you need to have a Social Media strategy – more on that on another day.

Once you are ready to embrace the reality of public dialogue, it is time to find out what people may already be saying about you. There are many tools available to accomplish this, but unless you have a lot of time or are going to delegate this to someone who can concentrate on it, narrow your monitoring to a few key resources.

Although the online market is daunting for marketers, there are plenty of useful tools you can use to manage and monitor your online Reputation. Here are three easy to use tools:

Google Alerts

Google Alerts and Yahoo! Alerts are free, can be set up in minutes and will send you a daily update via email letting you know of any data they find using keywords related to your brand or other key issues.  This is a No Brainer for everyone in business.

Lexicon

Are people talking about your company on Facebook? If yes, then the Lexicon tool can help as it searches Facebook profiles for keywords and provides a snapshot of the chatter volume around those terms. The tool has some limitations but it new features are quickly being added.

Monitter

Everyone is talking about Twitter, but what are people talking about on Twitter? Beyond the integrated search of Twitter apps like Twhirl and TweetDeck, Monitter provides real-time monitoring of the Twittersphere.  Setup your own parameters (search terms) and geographic distance to monitor the chatter.

Enjoy!