As a marketer used to trying out and using social media tools, I test a lot of sites. To be perfectly honest, not all of them are ready for “prime time” use or are tools that every client should be using. It is interesting, however, to try and group unrelated sites together by function and sometimes it leads to a (hopefully) useful recap list like this one on how some of these newer tools might be useful when it comes to traditional PR activities. By now, most PR pros know about blog monitoring tools and search engines and likely use them to understand some conversations in social media. There are a host of other ways besides a general blog search, however, to turn up some interesting data points and information about brand reputation, who is talking about your brand and what they are saying. Here are just a few tools worth a look.

1. Summize – Rapidly growing in popularity, the easiest way to describe Summize is as a search engine for Twitter. The simple fact of Twitter is that there are millions of conversations taking place every day and many involve mentions of brands. For a real time snapshot of brand discussions from individuals on social media, Twitter is the place to be and Summize has the best interface to help you track it.
2. AllTop – If you haven’t been watching the rapid growth of Alltop, you need to start. It is essentially an aggregation of blogs by various categories, but there are a few things that set Alltop apart. The first is that the simple interface means you can really skim headlines for many blogs in a particular category quite easily. The second is that you no longer have to rely on relatively useless Technorati Authority figures to find top tier blogs. Alltop doesn’t have all the answers, but to see a quick view of what top bloggers are talking about in a particular category, it’s a great place to start.
3. TinEye – Though still in beta mode, this site is getting lots of attention because of the pioneering way that they are focusing on the next evolution of image search. Put frankly, image search is notoriously bad because it seldom reads an actual image and only reads elements like the file title and description around the image. TinEye works when you give it a URL location of an image, or upload an image of our own (like your brand logo, for example). Then the site goes to work, finding all instances of use for that particular image, giving you a great snapshot of how your brand is being remade and used across the web.
4. BrandTags – A brilliantly simple site from Noah Brier, this is a game-like site that asks visitors to share the first word that comes into their minds when faced with a brand logo. The resulting words are then shown in a tag cloud format with the most common words appearing largest. It offers an interesting visual snapshot of what people think about your brand, though it is still somewhat limited to only larger brands. If your brand logo is not in there, you can always submit a note to Noah to ask to be included.
5. YackTrack – One of the big problems with keeping up with Social Media is that people can comment on content that you upload in so many different ways on so many different sites that it becomes nearly impossible to track and respond to all of it. YackTrack offers a useful tool where you can enter a URL and see a list of comments made on various sites about it (including the closed wall of Facebook). It’s a great way to track comments on a particular piece of content across multiple channels.
6. TimeTube – This mashup site offers a way of plotting all YouTube videos that match a particular keyword against a timeline to see when they occurred. If your brand inspires a lot of videos discussing it, this tool will give you a great overview of when these videos are typically posted and offers an engaging way to bring them together in a chronological format that few others can offer.
by Rohit Bhargava