Below is a non-exhaustive list of monitoring tools and places to go to keep up with the newest and greatest tools. I’ve been putting it together with other online participants while watching (and Webcasting) the Social Media Monitoring panel.

Some tools are free, others are for a fee. The general recommendation is to start with the free tools until you really know what your needs are so you can then value the pay services (what you need versus what their feature set is).

Feel free to add tools to the list by using the comments section. I’ll update the post based on feedback.

Tools – some free, some for a fee

  • Socialmention: a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
  • Samepoint: a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about.
  • dna13: on-demand software for real-time reputation management, dnaEnterprise provides complete visibility into global reputation.
  • Collecta: Collecta monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, so we can show you results as they happen.
  • Cymfony: scans and interprets the millions of voices at the intersection of social and traditional media. Maestro, a listening and influence platform, integrates technology with expert analysis to identify the people, issues, and trends impacting your business – at the speed of the market. Combining automated analysis with human interpretation, TNS Cymfony provides products and services that deliver intelligence on consumer preferences, competitor strengths and weaknesses, and other information critical to a company’s reputation, brands, products and employees.
  • Radian 6: a platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web.
  • Icerocket: an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs.
  • Filtrbox: leverages the power of the Internet by delivering the timely market intelligence that is critical to success in today’s hyper-competitive business world.
  • Peoplebrowsr: PeopleBrowsr is a Social Search engine and a Conversation Mine that looks into the heart of digital conversations and engages across multiple networks simultaneously. We are an intelligent data service provider to enterprise. We are a powerful social network tool for individual users. We build web applications that look into the data mine. Our core strategy aims to provide a live stream of conversations and mentions for: social search, engagement, work flow, real-time and historical analysis.
  • TweetCloud: Tweetcloud was born out of a project to synthesize meaning from a high volume of short messages. Our goal is to quickly show users “what’s being said” across the Twittersphere or from a specific Twitter user through an intuitive interface (a cloud). Type in a word and get a cloud of words most often tweeted in conjunction with that word.
  • What the Trend: What the Trend helps you find out what’s trending on Twitter and why. We are “The front page of the real-time web™.” When a new topic becomes popular on Twitter, it’s listed as a “trending topic.” These topics may take the form of short phrases (i.e. Michael Jackson) or hashtags (i.e. #iranelection).
  • Vocus: Our web-based Public Relations software suite helps organizations of all sizes manage local and global relationships and communications with journalists, analysts, public officials and other key audiences.
  • Cision: Cision provides media intelligence services to executives and individuals employed in a range of disciplines, including public relations, investor relations, marketing, and corporate communications.
  • Lexalytics: sentiment software and text analytics solutions, providing entity extraction, sentiment analysis, document summarization and thematic extraction. Lexalytics provides companies with the ability to extract important metadata from numerous data sources to get straight to the relevant information.
  • pip.io: a social operating system that aims to give people the ability to share and communicate in real-time. You can search what other people are communicating about in real-time based on contextual, geographical, and chronological relevance. As an operating system, we allow full functionality of third party web apps within the Pipio ecosystem.
  • OneRiot: a realtime search engine. Search with OneRiot to find fresh, relevant search results as they emerge on the social web – the news, stories and videos that people are buzzing about right now.
  • CrowdEye: By tracking discussions on Twitter, we can help our users find out what’s important to them right now in real time. CrowdEye has created technology to scan through tweets, retweets, twitter links and more. We then provide you with powerful yet easy ways to slice, dice, summarize and categorize the data to answer your questions.
  • Scoopler: a real-time search engine for discovering what people are talking about on the internet right now.
  • Google analytics: shows you what the most important parts of your site are for visitors and the most important topics.
  • bit.ly – a tool to shorten a web address so you don’t waste lots of your precious 140 twitter characters on the URL of whatever site you want your followers to visit.

Case Studies
Johnson & Johnson has done a great job using social media.

800 Flowers have also done a good job managing twitter and other social media crisis’. While they have occassionally stumbled, they’ve learned from their mistakes.

Keep up with tools
http://takemetoyourleader.com/2009/03/24/free-social-media-monitoring-tools/
http://wiki.kenburbary.com
http://kdpaine.blogs.com/ – blog about measurement for social media.