I was reading a booked called Just Listen by Mark Goulston over the last few days and it reminded me of the importance of listening online (e.g. monitoring your brand). Before you embark on any social media initiative you should always start listening to see what is being said and where it is being said.

There are hundreds of tools available, some are free and some are very expensive. Here are some free tools that will help you get started.

1. Google Alerts – Google alerts allows you to set up an e-mail alert for mentions of specific search terms. For example, set up a google alert with your company name and if your name is mentioned on the web you’ll get an e-mail about it. It’s not a perfect tool as it doesn’t catch everything but still quite useful. For an advanced tip, go to google.com and click on advanced search. Enter in whatever details you want for this search, click on the advanced search button and then copy whatever the search term is to your google alert. This allows you to set up a very powerful alert (note: in here you can also set up the alert to restrict based on country).

2. Social Mention and whostalkin are social search engines. They will display mentions of any search phrase across social media sites.

3. Technorati / Google Blog search – These are blog search engines. If you’re thinking of starting a blog find out what other people are writing about.

4. Boardreader – This is a search engine for forums.

5. Tweetbeep – This is the equivalent to Google alerts for twitter.

6. Twitter Search – Before starting working on a very time consuming platform such as twitter make sure you run some searches to see if people are talking about your product/brand or service.