Buzz monitoring services for Free

There are a lot of companies that will happily

relieve you of your dollars, in exchange for buzz monitoring services. While many large companies will enjoy the peace of mind that comes from having a company track their reputation for them, the rest of us need something a little less expensive–or better yet, free!

We’ve compiled a list of twenty six buzz monitoring tools that are free of charge. Use these tools to keep track of your company reputation or even spy on your competition! Take a look at Trackur.com if you need an all-in-one online reputation tracking tool.

1. Your Industry

If you simply don’t have time to track
everything that specifically relates to your
company–or your competition–you can still
track news that relates to your industry.
Moreover and Yahoo are just a couple of
resources that offer RSS feeds for
aggregated industry news.

2. Mainstream Media News

One of the best ways to track mainstream media
mentions of your company is to use Google News.
Enter your company name, sort the results by date
published and then subscribe to the RSS feed. You’ll
get instant RSS updates of any news items that
mention your business. Example for “apple“.

3. News Buzz

It’s one thing to track any news that relates to
your business, but what if you just want to know
about the news that becomes popular? Sites such
as Digg and Reddit will let you search for submitted
stories that match your company name. Subscribe to
the resulting RSS feed and you’ll know about any story
on Digg that mentions your company–or your biggest rival.

4. Social Media News

By the time a hot news story gets picked-up by
the mainstream media, it could have made the
rounds for days in the blogosphere. You can capitalize
on positive buzz and put out any reputation fires by
tracking social media. Technorati is one of the best
options for tracking social media sites. Custom RSS
feeds let you get quick updates on
any blog that utters your company name.

5. Blog Posts

If a blog happens to “ping” the blogosphere,
the chances are that it will get on Google Blog Search.
Even if the blog isn’t in Google news, or doesn’t make
the main Google index, Google Blog Search might still
find that story that mentions your CEO or your recent
product launch. Get alerts to matching
stories via email or RSS.

6. Blog Comments

Sometimes tracking a blog post doesn’t reveal
the full conversation about your business. The
blog post might be positive, but those leaving
comments could attack your reputation. Services
such as co.mments.com track the comments left
on blogs. You can search for your brand and
subscribe to the RSS feed for instant updates.

7. Blog Conversations

A negative blog post appears on a low-trafficked
blog and there are no comments to track. End of
story? Not quite, what if a very popular blogger
picks up on the story? It could spread very quickly
and catch you by surprise.
Blogpulse’s conversation tracker will help you
track who’s linking to that blog post
about your company.

8. Blog Trends

How well is your competitor’s new product
launch going? Blogpulse trends lets you track
whether a keyword is getting growing blog
mentions or not.
Apple’s iPhone saw a 1000% jump in blog mentions
leading up to its launch.

9. Bookmarks

Remember the days when your customers would
bookmark your site in IE and you never knew about it?
Thanks to online bookmarking services such as del.icio.us
more people are sharing their bookmarks online.
RSS feeds make it easy to track whenever someone
bookmarks a web page that includes mention of your company.

10. Photos

Did an employee release a top-secret photo
of your new products? Did someone snap a photo
of your CEO leaving a strip-club? The chances are
high that they might upload it to image hosting sites
such as Flickr. Luckily, you can subscribe to an RSS
feed that will update you on any new image
that matches your company name?or the name of
your slimy CEO.

11. Videos

So what if your CEO was caught on video having a
lap-dance? Ouch! Ok, less damaging, someone
releases a video showing a negative product review.
Google Video recently switched focus to index videos
from many online hosting sites
(such as YouTube and MetaCafe).
Now you can keep track of videos
that include your company.

12. Tags

Wouldn’t it be great if you could enter a keyword
and see who used that word as a “tag” How much
better would it be if you could see matching tags
across more than a dozen sites? Keotag.com does
just that, making it easy for you to track if someone
tags a page using your company or product name.

13. Forum Posts

Sometimes the most important conversations
don’t happen on blogs. Forums and message
boards can host conversations about your company
and you’d never know about it. Don’t panic! Sites such
as Boardtracker.com will keep an eye on popular forums
for you and alert you by RSS if your
company is mentioned in a thread.

14. Changing Information

Wikipedia is one of the most trusted resources
for information on the web. You might be interested
in any updates to your company profile or maybe you
want to know if your competitor is trying to remove
links to your web site. Fortunately you can
track change history for any Wikipedia page and
have the changes sent to your RSS reader of choice.

15. Job Listings

If your competitor wants to start a new service or
launch a new product, the chances are they’ll need to
hire new staff to achieve this. Classifieds search engine
Oodle scours many online job listings and aggregates the
information in a central location. Set up RSS feeds for
searches on your biggest competitors and you’ll know
whenever they list a vacant position.

16. Financial Filings

You can get a good feel for the financial health of your
publicly-traded competitors by keeping a close eye on their
SEC filings. Use Edgar Online and you’ll know if they’re subject
to an SEC investigation or if their CEO is dumping stock faster
than Martha Stewart.

17. Conference Calls

Sticking with public companies, sometimes you can learn
some competitive information by listening to the company’s
conference calls. But who has time for that? SeekingAlpha lets
you subscribe to the RSS feed of conference call transcripts.
Open up the transcript and you can quickly get
a snapshot of their financial health. You might even
learn about a new product launch–one which you might
want to think about for your business.

18. Patents

Keeping track of patent filings was notoriously difficult
before Google Patent Search came along. Now you can
keep any eye on patents filed that relate to your industry.
Better yet, keep track of patents that might
violate your company held patents.

19. Events

Yahoo’s Upcoming lets you get RSS alerts on any
new event that matches your selected keyword. You
can keep track of conferences that you might want to
attend, or sponsor. In addition, you could keep track of
seminars or meeting being held by your competitors.

20. New Products

Let’s say you want to get some ideas of products that
might be hot right now. Amazon.com lets you view product
“tags” and then review similar tags. You can use this to get
an idea of companion products that you might want to launch.

21. Search Query Trends

What search queries are popular at Google right now?
Thanks to Google Trends you can get an idea of which
keywords are most searched for. You can narrow your
research to specific countries or cities–letting you know
if a product has global or local appeal.

22. Keyword Referrals

Sure you could probably take an educated guess as to
which sites might get the most traffic for a particular
keyword, but it’s more fun to actually spy on your
competitors. Compete’s Search Analytics allows you
to enter a keyword and see which web sites are getting
traffic for that keyword.

23. Site Referrals

Ok, so maybe you’re not sure which keywords
you should target for your next SEM campaign.
Compete’s Search Analytics will also let you enter
any domain name and see which keywords are
driving traffic to that site. Now you know which
keywords your competitors are targeting.

24. Email Updates

If you’re not quite ready for all of that RSS reader
nonsense, you can still keep track of the latest buzz
via email. Google Alerts let you track web, blogs,
news and groups for any phrase you want. Select
daily, weekly or “as it happens” updates and you’ll
get an email whenever your company name is
mentioned.

25. The Untrackable

Some stuff just can’t be tracked that easily. If you
want to track changes at a site–even if they don’t
offer RSS or email updates–there are many tools
that will do it for you. Our favorite is Copernic’s Tracker
which, for $50, will let you keep an eye on any web site.
Use it to monitor RipOffReport.com, forum threads, or
even your competitor’s web site.

26. Anything You Want

You don’t have to be a developer in order to
create your own custom buzz monitoring tool.
Thanks to Yahoo Pipes, you can quickly set up
your own RSS tracking, complete with filters.
Want to track Twitter for mentions of your
company? Not a problem with Yahoo Pipes.

Over to You

So, that should be enough buzz monitoring tools
to get you going. Some are more useful than others,
but all are FREE! What are your favorite buzz monitoring
tools? Leave a comment or post to your own blog and ping me.

Andy Beal