You have heard all of the hype regarding social media, but you have no idea why your company should use it. There are plenty of blogs that you can read about the conversation and marketing aspects of social media, so I will not go into those topics here. You have also probably heard people in your company that are scared to let people onto social media sites even if it is to respond to a negative comment about your company. The reasons for this typically stem from fear, i.e. “What if people say something bad about our company?” Along with many other people, I am here to tell you that worrying about whether people are saying negative things is wrong. People are already saying negative things, and maybe positive as well, but you do not know about it.

So, how do you find out what people are saying? You monitor social media. In this post, I am going to go through some basic free tools that can help you get started with monitoring. Over the next few posts I will be talking about various tools that you can use for monitoring different sites. First, let’s look at the free tools that give you a basic level of monitoring:

Google Alerts gives you the ability to save a search over the web, news, blogs and groups and receive an email with the results. This type of alert is a nice way to start as it gives you some nice information in an email. Google’s recent introduction of real-time search data will make Alerts a more interesting option as well.

Twitter Saved Searches give you the results from a basic Twitter search. The saved search can be viewed as an RSS feed in you favorite RSS reader, or converted into an email using an RSS-to-email conversion service. Twitter searches are helpful if your typical customers or users are on Twitter, but it obviously suffers from being specific to one service.

Facebook Lexicon is the search platform for facebook. The good part is that Facebook has over 350 million users now. The bad part is that you are still stuck with searching one service.

BoardTracker lets you search bulletin boards and forums. Many services do not search forums, so this is a very handy tool to know about.

Yahoo Pipes is more of a development tool for non-developers, but it is still somewhat complicated. If you have someone with technical savvy, they can probably build an interesting tool. At the minimum, they can pipe together an RSS feed from a Google Blog Search and an RSS feed from a Twitter search. You can also look around for some prebuilt social media pipes to help you get started.

This should get you started with monitoring social media. Even though these tools are free and typically very good, they only give you an elementary start to your social media monitoring. For a long list of various tools you can use for monitoring social media, take a look at http://wiki.kenburbary.com/. I will be talking about several of those tools later. Of course, I would prefer that you give YackTrack a try.