Free buzz monitoring tools

Addict-o-matic

A simple tool that tells you rapidly what people are saying about your brand in the form of moveable widgets. Addictomatic is basically exhaustive, by offering Twitter, Friendfeed, Bing News, Google blog search, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Twingly, Delicious as sources, along with others. No identification is necessary, all you need to do is copy the URL of your search to your favorites to have access to it at all times.

Bloglines

This RSS feed, in competition with Netvibes, is very well known in the United States. It can be used to begin monitoring sources that you are interested in. Since recently, theBloglines portal is accessible via iPhone.

Blogpulse

A free service by Nielsen Buzzmetrics, it easily allows you to search your brand’s name being mentioned on the blogosphere. Blogpulse also allows you to have access to influence statistics of numerous American blogs. Finally, the trend section offers graphs of the most discussed subjects on the blogosphere.

Board Tracker

A little less known than the previous ones, this tool specializes in the monitoring of forums. Boardtracker currently follows more than 66 million topics on more than 37,000 forums. The site mostly monitors English speaking forums.

Commentful

Commentful is a service that monitors comments left on blogs, Diggs, Flickr photos and other places. After the (free) signing up and set-up, Commentful sends you a notification for every new comment.

Friendfeed Search

The lesser known cousin of Twitter also has an internal search engine. Friendfeed Searchis potentially more interesting than Twitter, as not only does it retrieve text, but also generated content such as photos and videos (and other content) posted by users.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is an essential program for anyone following a brand or company’s occurrences on the Internet. Simple and easy to use and usually relevant, it has evolved a lot over the past year, as you now have the option of transforming the alerts into RSS feeds (which can be integrated in a feed aggregator). A very interesting option when dealing with mailboxes filled over capacity.

How Sociable

How Sociable isn’t a monitoring tool in the classic sense, it is a tool that takes note of your visibility on social networks. You can have your Google Blog Posts score, Twitter score, Flickr score, YouTube, Myspace and etc. on the same page. This tool could be useful in the long run to determine the impact of your actions on social networks.

Icerocket

Icerocket is above all a search engine that specializes in the indexing of blogs, using the "fresh links" concept to identify en vogue topics. It also offers a search module for MySpace, making it the only one of these tools that does so.

Keotag

As its name suggests, Keotag allows you to make a search based on contents tags. One you have chosen the tag, Keotag lets you choose which websites you want to search. The classics are among the choices: Google, Twitter, Technorati, Reddit, Digg and others. All the results are then posted on the same page.

Monitor This

MonitorThis, like Addictomatic, incorporates the results of 26 different search engines on the same pages. We do however notice, a lack of pertinence in regards to the language of the results. For example, when one searches "iPhone", 2 of the first 5 URLs are Japanese...

Samepoint

With an interface purposely similar to Google’s, Samepoint primarily indexes content on social media. The site sets itself apart from others thank to its results page. Though it may be dense, it offers some very pertinent functions, such as the being able to translate content, tweet the results, follow indexed Twitter accounts and subscribe to the RSS flux.

Surchur

More than just a buzz monitoring to be used for a brand or sector, Surchur shows the current discussions underway online by the big players such as Yahoo Buzz, CNN Topics, Google Trends, Twitter Search trends topics, and Technorati Popular. With these sources, you are bound to be in the heart of the action almost immediately.

Technorati

Probably the most well known search engine dedicated to blogs, Technorati also offers its famous rank, as well as its note of authority. These both go to show the influence of the source. You can also search for videos and photos contained in the referenced articles.

Tinker

Tinker’s main purpose is to index Twitter statuses as well as other content generated on social media (the sources are not pointed out.) You can begin after signing up, after which you can choose a keyword. You are alerted every time the keyword comes up. You can also export a widget that corresponds with the results of your search.

TweetDeck

Besides for being one of Twitter’s most popular desktop clients, Tweetdeck allows for the creation of groups within the users you are following. In the spirit of monitoring, you can simply search among the tweets and find out live what people are saying about your brand.

Twitter Search

The Twitter search engine is a very simple tool for those wanting to monitor a brand’s reputation on Twitter. No signing up is necessary, its a tool that can’t be done without.

UberVu

Soon, UberVu will make it possible to respond to comments generated on Friendfeed, Digg, Picasa, Twitter and Flickr on the same platform. If you add the probable transparency of Facebook statuses, this tool could become the lethal weapon of community managers, as it would compile all conversations on social media in one place. There is even an API...

WikiAlarm

All the professionals that monitor a large brand know the extent to which the Wikipedia community authors and editors are fast at updating information. As its name suggests,WikiAlarm allows you to be notified every time the page you have marked gets updated.

Yahoo ! Sideline

The Yahoo! Twitter client closely resembles Tweetdeck. Although you can’t tweet from Sideline, you can do your searches over the long terms, and the search parameters ofSideline are more precise than those of Tweetdeck. You can search for precise phrases, and can even appreciate the polarity of tweets by interpreting the smiley faces!