Keeping tabs on buzz about your brand is vital. Even if a company is less involved directly in social media, its customers almost definitely are, and their conversations can end up a big story. According to a survey of business technology professionals by InformationWeek Analytics, most companies are relying on relatively low-tech solutions to the [...]

So you’ve set up your social media empire using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and you’re blogging too.But how do you make it all work together? You want to reach potential clients and establish your authority online, but what’s your plan?

Measurement is a discipline, and it needs to be business-wide. If you’re going to ask about the ROI, value, or impact of social media and how to measure it, I’m going to ask how you’re going about determining those things for other areas of your business, and ask you to translate or adapt some of those practices over to social initiatives.

As we have found at my company, the great free social media monitoring tools only get you so far. Once you decide to invest more time into social media, you should probably invest some dollars into monitoring. The major advantage is the customisable dashboards you get with the paid tools which give you a great visual representation of your social brand on the web.

To start off with, here are some free tools you could try in order to find out what’s being said about your brand in the social world. These tools are great as far as reach, but because most are search engines, they don’t offer the pretty (and useful!) dashboards you get from the paid tools.

There is so much rock and roll going on involving businesses running social media campaigns. However, there are not many social media rockstars. Their guitars vary. Some rock hard and some… not so hard. Some even have broken guitar strings. We don’t notice the size of their guitars though. What we notice is the kind [...]

Now onto the list. What follows is a huge and long list organized by subject. You’ll likely want to scroll or hit CTRL+F to find what you’re looking for. For example, you can hit CTRL+F and type ‘Pandora’ to see all the other competing companies that are like Pandora, but a bit different. Enjoy!

If your organization is looking at diving into social media for the first time (or is ready to expand it social media efforts) you’re probably wondering: Is this something we should do ourselves, or should we hire someone to do it for us?

PostRank is a scoring system developed by AideRSS to rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be.

KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media websites.

Social Mention is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

Trendrr allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. You can even compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating this comparison across a variety of sources.

CodePaste.NET is a public site for pasting snippets of code and linking to them from social network sites.

The Directory for Designers was created so that designers from all across the globe could share their various social media profiles allowing the community to easier connect. If you’re looking for someone in particular just search for that person’s name and find all of the directories they’re members of.