In my previous post on Tweetdeck, I showed how your brand can be monitored based on tweets, but there are a lot of other social media outlets that might be referencing you – blogs, photo uploads, videos, etc. Monitoring this information is referred to as Social Listening or Reputation Management. Social Mention is a free tool that scans a lot of these outlets and returns a list about where you are mentioned. It then goes one step further by trying to associate sentiment to these posts – are people saying nice things, bad things, or neutral things? While the solution has some consistency issues, it does provide some insight and it’s free. Watch the video to get some more info.

The things I like about Social Mention are:

• It’s free
• It provides some metrics like passion and reach in an attempt to provide some analytics about your social media reputation
• You can drill down into result sets
• You can set up email alerts
• For data fiends, you can export information into a spreadsheet for further analytics
• There is also an API that allows you to develop applications around the Social Mention Engine

There are other tools out there that might be better, but they cost money. At the very least, you should check out Social Mention and see if it helps you manage your brand.