If you don't have time to microblog, nanoblog!

I previously posted why social media analysis tools are important at Take Me To Your Leader,  and ever since I’ve been trying a bunch on them and our shortlist includes Visible Technologies, Techrigy SM2, Converseon, and Collective Intellect on the high end, and trackur and BrandsEye on the mid/low end ..  I will post a nice comparisson later this week.

However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.

Start by setting up a folder for the brand you want to monitor, this of course could be yourself.

Next create 7 folders: Must Reads, Blogs, Comments, Message Boards, Social Bookmarkting, Microblogging, and General …

Folder 1 - Must Reads: this folder contains services that I feel pick up a good overview of where your name is being mentioned on the web. This is the one folder that I know if I only have a couple of minutes to spend looking that I have to hit. For this I use Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts.

Folder 2 - Blogs: consist of most user generated content that doesn’t get picked up as news or alert. Use Google Blog Search, Blog Pulse and Technorati

Folder 3 - Comments: pick up comments and opinions of all those users who don’t write full blogs. use Backtype.

Folder 4 - Message Boards: interesting topics here; Board Reader does a good job at following conversations where people often forget to look.

Folder 5 - Social Bookmarking: follow services such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.

Folder 6 - Microblogging: I used to have twitter search and a few other things in here but I have really been impressed by the Twingly microblog search… or of course, use any of the tools from my Twitter Tools post.

Folder 7 - General: So thus far I’ve been just teasing, I like all those tools but 9 out of 10 times I don’t set any of them up … The quick solution is to use some mass social media search engine such as Serph, Keotag, and my favorite, Social Mention.

I have all this set up and it allowed me to find every tweet, every blog post, every comment about my panel at SXSW the same day they were posted. So try it for yourself, you’ll see how addicting is to find everything that everyone says about you or your brand …

Keep reading take me to your leader for more social media related news.

I posted a great list of social media monitoring tools at Take Me To Your Leader ... here's an extract.

Brand Overviews

• HowSociable? - A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
• Addict-o-matic - A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
• socialmention - A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Buzz Tracking

• Serph - Track buzz in real time
• Google Trends - shows amount of searches and google news stories
• Trendpedia - Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.
• BlogPulse Trends - Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT)
• Omgili Charts - Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums.
• eKstreme - blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (behind Facebook and MySpace), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.

Find a full collection of the best tools to analyze, aggregate, and visualize twitter data here.