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I am part of a panel tonight at Social Media Club Phoenix on Social Media Monitoring. As part of my prep for the panel, I have been doing some extra thinking about the various monitoring options out there. This isn’t meant to be a complete list. Rather it is a list of the monitoring options I use and like.

Free options:

Kurrently.com – Monitors what is said about you/your brand on Twitter and Facebook.  Allows you to scope your results by either platform or all results. Also allows you to change the search platform. Results are easy to read and straight forward. You can even get them as an RSS feed, if you are willing to pay for it.

SocialOomph.com – Will send you an update of tweets on a topic every 12 or 24 hours. As a free member, you can monitor one keyword set. Paid members have the option to set up more monitors. Also allows you to do auto-posting and scheduled posting to multiple Twitter, Buzz, and StatusNet accounts for free. Paid members can also set up accounts for FaceBook. blogs, and Ping.fm. The auto-posting and click statistics are good. The rest? I can live without it.

SocialMention.com – Live monitoring, plus the option of a daily HTML email. Live monitoring can be done at any time on any search term. Live monitoring is great, when it works. (Sometimes it is slow/incomplete.) If you wish, you can create a CSV file of the results as well as files with the sentiment, keywords, users, and hashtags for your search term. No reply or tracking available. In the past, I have had a problem canceling email alerts. (That may have gotten better lately.) The biggest plus for SocialMention: They attempt to search everywhere. The biggest minus: There is no timeframe given for the results.

Trackur.com – Give them a keyword, filter it as desired, tell it to exclude your own domain (or some other), and set the system searching. Trackur comes back with a dead simple chart of the daily result counts, as well as the most recent results. Filter the results by date or sentiment if you want.  Sort them by influence or sentiment. Export your results to a CSV file so that you can work with them yourself. An added bonus: Save your search and let the site run in your browser. The system will update your results about every 30 minutes.

TweetDeck/CoTweet/HootSuite/Seesmic, etc. – Each of the main Twitter client has built in the ability to perform live searches on keywords. The results are Twitter only. There is no way to save the results. Response is built into each of the clients, but tracking and assigning of items isn’t in TweetDeck.

Paid options:

UberVu.com - UberVu has a limited free option that lets you search for terms and see basic analytics. Terms are monitored over Twitter, WordPress, and Discus for free.  If you are a paid user, you get much better analytics and tracking, better filtering, PDF and Excel exports, assignments for activity, plus additional sources (Facebook, Buzz, MySpace, and more). The site and the data has improved massively over recent months, but the cost has gone up as well.

justSignal.com – A Scottsdale company, justSignal allows you to monitor mentions of individual terms or complex search strings. They cover a wide range of the social web, including Twitter, YouTube, Backtype, blogs, and more. They will set up a trial for you in some circumstances, but they are mostly a paid service.  Using the live monitoring page of the site, you can see a wide range of analytics, as well as three different sets of content details from Twitter, Flickr, blog entries, and blog comments. The one thing I love most about their system? Daily and weekly email PDF reports with charts and analysis of your mentions and reach.

Sysomos.com – Now a part of Marketwire, Sysomos has a monitoring side (Heartbeat) and a tracking side (MAP). The two sides combine are one of the best measurement and monitoring systems that exist. The data is verified and cleaned regularly. The customer support is awesome. The interface is great. The reporting and statistical analysis is better than any other system I have used. There isn’t much not to love about Sysomos. The only reason they aren’t my only solution? The price. They are aimed at the enterprise user (for the most part) and the pricing shows it.

My evaluation

If you are just looking to monitor the mentions of a small product or company, a combination of the free systems will get you where you want to go. They each give you a different picture, so you won’t want to depend on just one of the systems. You will need to do your own measurement and analysis off the results they give, but it is doable.

If you have the money to spend on a paid system, go with the one that best fits your budget. justSignal or Sysomos would be my first choices, but if you can’t afford them… go with UberVu.

Want a test term for your own monitoring system evaluation? Do what I did… search for “OneNote” – the solution for all your note taking needs. Unique term, currently being talked about, and safe for work.

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What do you do when the latest geek gadget isn’t something you need, but is something you would like to write about? You borrow one, of course!

• The gadget in question: An iPad

• Loaned to me by: Symbaloo

Full disclosure time:

Symbaloo is a sister company and client of The Social Media Party, my current employer. That said, I fell in love with Symbaloo on first introduction. I love the concept of the mixes and the implementation. Sharing content from the web just got a lot easier for US netizens. Join me and try it out!

My thoughts

I had use of the iPad for a week. I loved some of it, hated other parts of it. The things that impacted me the most?

What I loved: Symbaloo 2.0 on the iPad

Symbaloo 2.0 allowed me to navigate the web in a natural, consistent, and convenient way. Symbaloo is a site new to the US. They allow you to create landing pages (called mixes) created of tiles. Each tile is linked to another piece of information on the web, such as:

• Web pages

• News or RSS feeds

• Widgets

• Other mixes

Want to learn how easy it is to use Symbaloo 2.0? Kimmie Chann, Symbaloo’s Community Director for the US, has posted a series of videos on how to use it. Check out this one on “How to Edit and Search for Webmixes”:

How to edit and search for webmixes on Symbaloo

Symbaloo 2.0 wasn’t created for the iPad. It just happens that it works there amazingly well. See for yourself!

Symbaloo 2.0 on the iPad

I also found Symbaloo 2.0 a great way to access my feeds through my iPad. I didn’t like any of the free RSS readers I saw in the apps list. Symbaloo 2.0 let me get to the feed content without hassles or expense. I created an RSS tile for the feeds I wanted to read on the iPad and saved the mix. Voila – My own RSS reader!

Symbaloo Mix for Social Media Feeds

See those feeds live via Symbaloo 2.0!

Clicking a link inside one of those tiles gets you to the linked post. Clicking the box itself usually takes you to the home page for the feed. I say usually because some of the feeds are set up to take you to a page where you can auto subscribe. That’s a feature of the feed settings, not Symbaloo 2.0.

Because Symbaloo 2.0 is all tile based, it was easy for me to navigate without typing. Since typing was the one thing that really bugged me on the iPad, finding that Symbaloo 2.0 worked so well was a definite good thing.

I won’t go so far as to say that I would buy an iPad to use Symbaloo 2.0 on it. I might think about it with a 3G iPad, since that would give me anywhere access. What I will say is that after this week of using the iPad, if someone offered me one – I’d keep it. Until then, I will keep using Symbaloo 2.0 on my desktop and my tablet and leave the iPads to the rest of you.