I would like to point you in the direction of this article on econsultancy.com that lists their top 20 free buzz monitoring tools (still) including the likes of Technorati, Google’s alerts (a personal favourite and so easy to set up and manage), howsociable? and Icerocket.

If you haven’t already, please please set up a google alert on your company name at the very least. These are free tools. Sure you need the time to work out what to search for, set up and then read the results, but it is time well spent. I promise. If the foundations of marketing are measurement, then the very least you can do is use some of the free tools to start measuring where you are today to compare against in the future after you’ve made ‘all those improvements’.

There are others that I’m not so familiar with such as Keotag (searches key words) and samepoint (converstation searches - e.g. essential for all IR teams to monitor trade chat - even tells you if the conversation has negative words in it)

Please read the whole list and start using it!

‘njoy.