In my last blog, I explained how to pull together an effective social media strategy; now its time to check out the tools youll need to monitor your efforts. Over the next couple of blogs, Ill look at some of the more popular social media monitoring tools, and how they can benefit your company.

Buzzgain
Buzzgain is a social media monitoring tool that can research, index and catalog more than 104 million blogs, vlogs, message boards and more. You can then integrate the information it gathers into your CRM solution. In terms of numbers, Buzzgain can increase customer conversion by 45 percent, and reduce the sales cycle by 15 percent. It also enhances word-of-mouth mentions and reduces the cost of lead generation by 55 percent. With Buzzgains help, you can identify audiences that are constantly defining and shaping your company so you can better listen, learn and engage to build relationships with these influential people. Buzzgains services are split into four sections public relations, customer service, sales and marketing and its available in a 15-day free trial.

Sysomos
With real-time content tracking and customer feedback, this product focuses on being in the moment. The Sysomos database, which dates back to 2006, allows up-to-the-minute monitoring. Dont worry even though its information comes from around the world, it can quickly be translated. Sysomos significantly reduces the time you spend analyzing conversions, because it automatically evaluates them based on sentiment. Using language analysis and contextual understanding technology, Sysomos allows you to hone in on the relevant content and audience. With the ability to compare many competitors across many fields, you can identify those driving the conversations about your brand (authority? relevance?). Sysomos also offers a free demo.

Alterian (previously Techrigy)
With multiple levels of coverage, including blogs, message boards, wikis, video, classifieds and more, Alterian allows you to choose which level you want to use. It can monitor brands, identify key communities/influences, address customer service issues, generate new sales leads and more, as well as translate its findings into 16 different languages. Its social media warehouse contains 9 billion social media mentions, with 35 million new results coming in each day. Alterians analysis includes brand reference and content tone to score its relevancy to your needs. Alterian also has a social media publisher, so it can get your content to various social media channels. Alterian offers product demos, as well as bi-weekly hot topic events and specialty analysis on various topics, such as the U.S. primary elections.

Radian6
Probably one of the best known social media monitoring tools, Radian6 has just about everything covered. It scours more than 150 million public sites and sources (blogs and comments, forums, mainstream online news pubs, public photos and videos, social networking sites, etc.) in real time.
You can access its social media metrics to choose the best measurements for your cause, and with the ability to segment by media type, location, language and more, you can also choose from more than 40 preconfigured widgets for data filtering and segmentation. Use these dashboard widgets to analyze trends and understand sentiment changes over a period of time. Radian6 offers 30 days of historical data right off the bat, and long-range historical data is available upon request. Radian6 offers social CRM and web analytics integration, and is built for enterprise-level scalability.

Remember, this is strictly an outsiders view so, if you see anything that looks out of place, feel free to comment.

Stay tuned for the next weeks list of additional social media monitoring tools. Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday!