Would you find it useful to know what people say about you in their conversations online? If you are engaging in social media this is not only useful but essential. Being unaware of conversations can be a hazard for your brand / business. It could also mean you miss out on excellent opportunities.

How about finding out about what is being said about your main competitor’s new product? Or understanding what your customers’ perceptions are about a particular issue that may impact on your activity? Or maybe finding out which blogs may be talking about the type of products and services your company is selling? And what would you do if you found out you have a tribe of fans that you were not aware of?

To achieve all of these and more you ideally need a social media reputation management measuring tool. However, if would like to form your own opinion on how this could be benefiting your business, before going for one of the commercial solutions, you should consider using one of the free tools that are available on the Internet.

In this post I look at some of these and assess their usefulness.

Howsociable (howsociable.com)

Howsociable presents a good and easy to use interface.  Enter the brand / name you want to monitor and the summary of results is reported on a single page. It is then possible to drill down into a specific channel. When I tried it on different brands the results that were returned were pretty good quality considering it’s a free tool.

Downside: there is no date / period of time filter functionality.
Upside: you can subscribe to be sent the results for your search in a monthly report by email.

Samepoint (www.samepoint.com/)

Samepoint is convincing and I would place it second favourite in my review.

Enter brand / name and launch the search. It only takes a few seconds to get results. These can then be filtered by discussion points, B2B network results etc..

Overall the search results seem to be quite relevant and it is possible to use ” ” to search for a specific string of words. Each result is qualified with a sentiment measure. Along with Socialmention it is the only tool which offers this functionality.

Each search can be subscribed to by email and RSS feed.

Downside: there are no reporting functionalities and it is not possible to extract any data
Upside: Overall, an impressive tool, with a Google page look-alike interface.

Addict-o-matic (addictomatic.com/)

Addict-o-matic works on the same principle as the other tools, you enter the name of the brand in the search field and launch the search. Results are very quickly displayed by channels. A nice feature is that you can then custom the page, add or remove channels, and bookmark the customised view as webpage which you will be able to revisit at any time.

Apart from the “see more results” button, it is not possible to drill down by keywords or to select a specific range of date. There is also no reporting functionality, or email alerts.

Downside: no Boolean search, and no alert system.
Upside: Very good interface, and the bookmarking feature is unique.

Whos Talkin (www.whostalkin.com/)

Whostalkin presents a really sleek and straightforward interface. On the left hand side are dropdown lists of all the media you can search. At the top a search field is present to enter your brand name / phrase. The results are quick to display. It’s simple and efficient. However there is no RSS feed, and no email alerts. Just plain and simple real time reputation search.

Downside: no alert system, no drill down options.
Upside: Boolean search is possible, and whostalkin searches a large number of different sources.

SocialMention (socialmention.com/)

Social mention presents itself as real time search tool. The principle is the same as for all the others and you enter a name or string of words using a search field.

With Socialmention it is possible to choose which source you would like to get search results from (blog, microblog, images, videos etc..).

Looking for “Marks and Spencer” the tool took a little while longer than the others to return search results (although it was still within a few minutes). Maybe this is because Socialmention searches more sources than other systems.

Socialmention has features that none of the other free tools have.

Results can be drilled down by top keywords, top users (influencers as they are called in other tools), top hashtags (twitter conversations), and sources. In my example of search on M&S, Twitter was the top source of conversations.

Sentiments, reach, passion, strength; these can become interesting when drawing comparisons between two brands.

Filtering by date, you can see only the last hour’s or day’s mentions, and history goes back 30 days which means that you can get monthly reports.

As with some other tools, it is possible to set a daily email alert for a word or phrase. You can save also your search as an RSS feed.

For reporting purposes, you can export the current search results as a CSV file, which is great to build up a history database of your mentions, or assign mentions to one of your team for actioning.
Social mention is intuitive and (this is also the case for Addict-o-matic), provides a plug-in to add Socialmention to your search engine tool bar.

Downside: I could not see any, for a free tool it’s doing really a lot.

In summary then and for those who like a feature comparison matrix:

Posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 12:05 pm in Buzz measurement, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.