The past week I have sent to emails to people to provide a list of listening tools. It struck as something that other people would be interested in as well!

If you read anything about social media best practices and strategies you will no doubt have seen over and the over that the first action you should take when considering social media is actually inaction, or in reality active listening! Use Google Alerts and Twitter Search to find where your community is and start watching and listening to what they have to say.

In addition there, is a wide variety of listening tools out there available to meet all your needs, some paid and some free, or with portions free.

Back type
Collective Intellect
Custom Scoop
LazyFeed
Meltwater
Monitter
My Blog Log
Radian 6
SM2
Social Mention
Trackur
Twilert
Who’s Talking
Yahoo Sideline

So if you are thinking about getting into social media for your company start listening, and if you are already involved keep monitoring and listening to your community and about you and you brand. It will keep you active and relavant.

Listen away!

Social media is not free, but it is very economical!  A lot of the tools – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, are free to sign-up for and use, but in order to have more impact on your target audience, some small investments need to be made. Below a describe some of the expenses associated to the main social media tools.

Twitter is free to sign-up for and use, but it is important to customize your background to be branded for your business. There are free tools to do this, or a small investment can be made by hiring a designer, which would typically leverage existing materials you already have for your website (colors, logo, etc).

A Facebook Page (for business) is free to sign-up for and use.  There are a few tricks to get it set-up correctly and it is important that it is branded for your company. Since there are limitations to the amount of branding you can do, this is generally just your logo. More complex pages require HTML.

Depending on the blogging tool you select, it is either free or has a minimum monthly fee. Although it is important to brand your blog, here, content is king.  The blog does not have to be overly designed, but there should be some reflection of your company or personality.  This can literally be done with a single photograph of stock photo and does not have to involve an entire blog design.  If you choose to do an entire blog design, there is a cost associated to that, but it is not exorbitant.

Newsletters are not traditionally considered social media, however, more and more businesses are using it to distribute the information that they produce on their blogs. The newsletter serves as a mixture of information and a driver to the website. The tool is usually not free, but has a small monthly cost associated with it.

For all of the tools above, depending on how comfortable you are using them, you may need the assistance of a social media coach or strategist (hey, like me!) There are best practices and tricks of the trade you may want to consider investing in by hiring a consultant. This should not cost you a limb and can set you off on the road to success more quickly.

One last thing, although in terms of dollars, social media may be very inexpensive, there is a labor cost associated with it in terms of your time. Social media does require some of your time.  There are methods to ensure that your time is used in a highly impactful way, but there is still a time investment that does need to b made.  The results, however, far outweigh the costs.

Recently I participated in the Problogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog project for my personal blog. It was a very enlightening project that I highly recommend for any blog (either business or personal that is at 6 months old. It is not something that you have to complete in 31 days.  Think of it as 31 lessons to refine/enhance/improve your blog.

The cool thing is that Darren Rowse of Problogger has put together the 31 tasks into a neat notebook which also includes bonus material that is not on his website.

I plan on using this workbook as an audit for my blogs every 6 months and I think it is useful enough for you as well!

Have a website or other online presence but have mainly offline clients? Want to train them to “move” online? Going to an event where you want to leave a physical brand impression that will get people to your website, Facebook group, blog or to follow you on Twitter? Enthusem offers a great solution for bridging your offline and online communications.

With enthusem you can create branded note cards with whatever messaging you want. Inside the card is your copy plus a pick up code to get your attachment.  The attachment can actually be a file – like if you were presenting at a conference and you wanted to offer the slides – or a specific url – you can direct people to a website, a blog, a promotion page, whatever you like.

I have had two experiences with enthusem, both interesting. The first was a card I received from Global Hugs Tour when I checked into my hotel for SOBCon at the beginning of May. It was a nice welcome card that directed me to the enthusem website where I entered a code printed into the card and was directed to a web page that gave highlighted the Global Hugs Tour project.

My second experience was when I received a card from the founder, Steve, after I followed him on Twitter (@enthusem). Instead of a generic DM, I got this card in the mail, which was much more personal and had more impact. It is more personal than a cookie cutter email and it provides a extra brand impression.

It costs $60 to send out 25 cards and $210 to send out 100. There are other amounts to which you can see on their site.

I highly recommend using enthusem as part of your offline and online communication strategy.

I first learned about Lijit at a blogging conference in February. I didn’t pay much attention because I thought it was a paid service. As a small business owner who needs to manage expenses like everyone else, it did not seem like a must-have. But as the posts started stacking up on my personal blog there were times when writing new posts that I wanted to link to an older post, and that started to be a pain. So I went over to the Lijit website and checked it out. And you know what? It’s free!

Lijit is a free search tool that can be easily added to your blog, and you can set it up to search any site you have, but not only that but you can add blogs on your blog roll too as well. That is part of the concept, to provide search to sites that you trust. People don’t have to worry about what is going to be on the other end of the link that they click on. The search results will be from a trusted source and it provides further legitimacy (get it…lijit..) to your content and the content you endorse.

I have had a couple of requests for this, so I thought I would make it this week’s post.

Do you check yourself or your business on Google? Google is every brand’s new home page. If you are not checking out what comes up in the search results you are missing out on a very effective tool. What about your competitors? What about industry news? There is a very simple, powerful and free – tool that is available to everyone. The Google Alert.

To begin, go to the Google Alerts main page.

Next, enter the search words you want (one set at a time) and choose the type, how often and to what email address you want it delivered to and click on the Create Alert button. Having used the tool for awhile, I suggest the following words of advice, for type select comprehensive gives you the best view of all media types, you would be amazed and the interesting blog stories or videos I have come across. For frequency, if it is a highly unique term, like your business, then selecting “as it happens” should not be too overwhelming, but for more generic industry or trending terms, you will want to go with “once a day” otherwise your in-box will be flooded!

You will then get a page that lists your Alerts. At the bottom of the list, there will be a link to create additional ones. And that is pretty much it!

P.S. Yahoo also has an alert tool, but I don’t find the results to be as good, or the tool as easy to use.