The Hartsock Agency

“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down. ” (Ray Bradbury)

If you’re still feeling hesitation about the importance of social media and all that it can do for you, here are 10 free tools to aid you out of your cynicism.

1. Use Google Alerts for your company name, book or brand and see how many other folks are already talking about your brand without you. Join the playground.

2. Use Technorati.com to register your blog and track other like-minded – link-minded blogs. Revel in link-love and cross-promote one another with glee.

3. See what the absolutely free tool  HowSociable reveals about your brand’s Web 2.0 visibility with its 22 metrics.

4. Want to track trend buzz in real time for free? (And who wouldn’t?) Use Trendpedia and see what’s happening.

5. Get TweetBeep to track in real-time mentions of you on Twitter. (It’s just like Google Alerts but for Twitter instead!)

6. Let’s not leave out MessageBoards and metrics for those – try BoardReader which can track several boards at once and forums too.

7. Google Groups – lets you search usenet groups.

8. Use Bit.ly to track free all your links and where they resurface in link-love-land.

9. Use SocialMention to see how social your presence is.

10. Use BlogPulse Trends to check the pulse keywords and phrases for optimal SEO on your site or your blog.

Bonus Tool: Use Facebook’s free Lexicon to track buzz on Wall posts!

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