If you have been following social media trends at all, you’ve probably heard a lot about joining “the conversation” and how to participate. You may have also heard the warning: “people are talking about your company whether you are there or not”. This is absolutely true and is a great reason to jump into social media and start participating. If you are part of the conversation, you can respond to inquiries, do damage control, and offer better customer service.

So how do we keep up with all the conversations? Here are three things you can set up in a matter of minutes to start monitoring conversations about your brand.

1. Utilize Google Alerts. This is probably one of simplest but most effective tools available for brand monitoring. Google Alerts allows you to create keyword specific alerts that will email you each time content appears on the web that contains those keywords. Since my company name is SpinWeb, I have an alert set up to monitor the word “SpinWeb”, which means I get emails every time my company is mentioned on the web.
2. Set up alerts on TweetBeep. TweetBeep is a free service (for up to 10 alerts) that monitors conversations on Twitter and then sends you emails listing all the tweets containing your keyword. An alert set up for “SpinWeb” sends me a daily (or hourly, if I prefer) email containing all tweets talking about my company. This makes it easy for me to selectively jump into conversations that interest me.
3. Scan social networks with SocialMention. This service tracks over 80 social networks for your keyword, including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. SocialMention also has some nice additional features that monitor strength and influence of conversations.

If you’re looking for a super-easy way to get started with brand monitoring via social media, spending a few minutes setting up these three tools is a great place to start. It will automate your efforts and keep you alerted to what’s being said about your company. You will also find that it strengthens your online relationships because you are able to actively participate whenever anyone is talking about you, and that’s great customer service.