Blueclaw is constantly finding new and innovative ways to monitor our social media efforts and nothing is worse than not being able to tell if all your hardwork (building blogs, profiles, engaging in conversation etc ) is paying off or not.

Personally, I’ve used and experimented with free online tools like Social Mention, Backtype and How Sociable?, all 3 are useful to a certain extent, Social Mention’s cleaner and less cluttered interface, accuracy and search return volume means I like it more than the other two.
These sites are great for very basic reporting though.

At the moment, I have been introduced to Radian6 (if you’ve never heard of Radian6 or need some getting used to with some terms used then I strongly suggest you give those 3 sites I mentioned earlier a try first). It’s definitely not free (and not cheap) but the abundance of useful information this neat thing can extract is endless that its almost overwhelming to the untrained eye.

All criticisms aside, Radian6 is a seriously powerful tool to measure the credibility and worth of the brand or client you’re working on. You can practically monitor brand presence and awareness in real-time, listen in on the conversations (River of News) that are taking place that you’d never have known.