I usually write about one application at a time and interview the provider. However, I could not resist posting about this excellent resource that Dan Schawbel posted on Mashable.  He wrote a post on the Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For. I have reviewed one of them on the AppGap – see Radian6 – Monitoring Social Media. You can find Dan’s view of Radian6 and 9 others through the above post. I list the complete ten below with a very brief summary of what Dan wrote. See Dan’s post for much more useful detail.

1. Buzzlogic offers “BuzzLogic Insights” application. They let you know whose blogging about you and allow you to share this data within your company. They target two groups: marketers and PR people.

2. Radian6 lets you setup keywords to monitor on all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and Twitter.

3. TNS Cymfony offers Orchestra Platform, with a Natural Language Processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies and topics for you.

4. Nielsen offers Buzzmetrics, wich gives brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. There is ThreatTracker with alerts of real-time online reputation threats.

5. Trackur offers a key word monitoring plan for individuals, companies, enterprises, and agencies. Trackur was “built by one of the leading experts in reputation management, Andy Beal” who was was also a case study in my business blog book.  

6. Brands Eye offers reputation management packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small businesses, and enterprises. It tracks every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that reflects the state of your reputation over time.

7. Reputation Defender offers four different services: Internet references of your child or youself, ability to remove your personal information from people search databases, and a solution for owning your Google results.

8. Sentiment Metrics helps you monitor what is being said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. It tells you if the mention is positive, negative or neutral.

9. Visible Technologies offers TruCast, a comprehensive solution for social media analysis and participation used by enterprises and TruView which protects and promotes reputations online.

10. Cision claims to monitor over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites. Their service is powered by Radian6.

It is important to monitor your online reputation and what others are saying, both good and bad. You should at least use Google Alerts, which is free. However, I frequently learn many things through Google Alerts about other people who share my name or worse people who only share my first or last name, or even worse, things like legislative bills. However, there are times I find very useful mentions that I would not have known about otherwise such as Lilia Efimova’s study of bloggers on Mathemagenic. If you want more and are willing to pay for it, try some of the above.