De fil en aiguille: 18 Essential Tools for Every Word-of-Mouth Marketer

Clay McDaniel is the principal and co-founder of social media marketing agency, Spring Creek Group. Find him via @springcreekgrp on Twitter.

By now, most consumer marketers know they could be using Facebook (
), Twitter (
), blogs, and other social media platforms to boost brand recognition, engage customers, and drive sales. But getting a social media marketing program started – and keeping up with the rapid pace of change in the industry – can be daunting. The good news is that with the right technology tools, social media marketing programs can be managed at scale and can help the entire organization (not just the marketers!) find out what customers are saying, sharing, even feeling about your brand or business.

When thinking about the technology tools you need to launch, measure, and optimize your social media marketing and online customer engagement programs, it helps to organize your efforts into categories: listening and monitoring tools; editorial, publishing, and content syndication tools; and conversation measurement tools. There are hundreds of tools out there, but here are some of the more popular and effective ones that can be put to work for you.

Social Media Listening and Monitoring Tools

The first step in any social media marketing campaign is “listening.” Find out what is being said about your brand, where, and by whom. The following tools provide visibility into conversations that are happening about your brand or company online.

1. Monitter allows marketers to listen in on the Twitter conversations taking place about their brand in real time. Visit the Monitter home page and type in the keywords you want to search, and all tweets with those keywords instantly appear. Free.

2. Google Alerts is one of the most comprehensive social media tools out there; it monitors millions of blogs and news sites. Set up alerts to easily target keywords that are important to your brand and receive streaming or batched reports. Free.

3. Alltop is an online news aggregation service that scans news sites, blogs, and forums to present a one-stop shop of thousands of news stories about a certain topic or trend. It also includes some useful historical searching tools. Free.

4. Visible Technologies TruCast and TruPulse are robust applications that allow licensees to monitor conversations about their brand or industry on blogs, forums, microblogs, comment threads, and anything else likely to be indexed by search engines. They include analytics features and integrated “engagement manager” workflow tools to assist in managing outreach/follow-up across the social web. Licensing fees apply.

5. Radian6 is one of the industry leaders in social media monitoring technology, and their application allows configurable monitoring dashboards, broad and narrow Topic definitions to target and focus your listening programs, and key features such as custom alerts and engagement workflow management. Licensing fees apply.

6. ScoutLabs has come on strong during the past year with a versatile listening and monitoring service and low per-month access pricing, as well as a 30-day free trial offer. Post volume, location, and even sentiment scoring are included in the service’s core monitoring feature set. Licensing fees apply.

7. TweetDeck (
) is a desktop app that combines Twitter and Facebook monitoring with search for a multi-dimensional social application that also allows for publishing. Free.

[*Disclosure: TweetDeck partnered with Mashable (
) to create MashDeck, a branded version of the software.]

8. PostRank Analytics combines trend analysis, engagement reporting and unified conversations to provide a hub for keeping track of your brands in the online space. Licensing fees apply.

9. BackType finds and connects online conversations in real-time creating a clear path of discussion. Free.

Editorial, Publishing, and Content Syndication Tools

Now that you’ve heard what’s being said about your brand, you’re ready to respond by creating your own messages. The following tools help you join the conversation and promote the sharing of your content.

10. Co-Tweet is a tool for businesses using Twitter to communicate marketing messages. The application offers Twitter account management and tweet publishing tools for brand accounts that utilize multiple contributors. Free.

11. HootSuite (
) also offers Twitter account management and tweet scheduling and publishing for brand accounts with many contributors. Free.

12. TubeMogul lets you syndicate your video content to multiple UCG video sites (YouTube (
) and some 15 others), and then track views and engagement metrics. Free and paid versions.

13. Seesmic Desktop (
) allows you to review and publish status updates across Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, and manage multiple social media accounts in one place. Free.

Conversation and Content Sharing Measurement Tools

The final, and perhaps most critical, step in your social media marketing campaign is measurement. The following tools enable you to measure and track everything from “soft metrics” like brand sentiment and buzz, to “hard metrics” like traffic and conversion resulting from your campaigns.

14. Meteor Solutions offers Meteor Tracker, which enables marketers to determine the real impact of social media marketing programs on traffic and conversion by tracking the flow of shared content via links, email, instant messages, social networks, and Twitter. Meteor lets marketers identify the most effective sites on which to make paid media buys, as well as sites to target for further community outreach. Licensing fees apply.

15. Jodange monitors word-of-mouth conversations about your brands or products to give a reading on customer sentiment. Jodange offers the TOM (Top of Mind) measurement tool, which tracks consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the web. Licensing fees apply.

16. Twendz is a Twitter monitoring and measurement tool created by public relations firm Waggener Edstrom that piggybacks off of Twitter Search to provide a snapshot of tweet volume, sentiment, and sample tweets. Mini keyword-clouds and sentiment mix estimates are automatically generated for brands or phrases that you input. Free.

17. Trendrr lets marketers set up configurable dashboards to see where conversations about their brand are happening, and how their industry, sector, or topic is “trending” across the social media web. Free.

18. Hubspot’s “Grader” Tools provide directional scores and metrics for channels such as Twitter and Facebook to help marketing and customer engagement program managers assess the relative impact of their branded Pages and accounts. Free.

More business resources from Mashable:

- 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Business
- Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto (
), RichVintage