PressDr.com - Press Release Distribution

A Comcast customer sits down to watch 30 Rock and finds that her cable service is down. She tweets about her frustration, and within minutes gets a response from a Comcast representative who helps her fix the problem. A United Airlines passenger blogs about a horrendous customer service experience and 48 hours later is approached by the company to make amends. This is reputation management in the 21st Century, my friend.

Real time response (or close to it) is quickly becoming the de facto standard among businesses trying to maintain their image. To stay in the game, it's imperative you stay on top of your customers' needs and issues. But how do you handle the fire hydrant of information being almost constantly spewed out online? Enter our Sentiment Analysis tool rundown. This array of free tools will give you a competitive edge in your pursuit of successful online reputation management (ORM):

1. Technorati.com - Technorati is a blog search engine that indexes millions (according to them) blog post in real time. Search for keywords related to your business or brand to find out what people are saying about you in the blogosphere.
2. MonitorThis – Sparse and unpretentious, MonitorThis allows you to search for keywords and see the resulting feeds from 20 plus different search engines.
3. Monitter.com - Monitter is an aptly named, well, real-time monitor of Twitter, following up to three keywords at a time. Part of what makes this program so powerful is the ability to track keywords by zipcode. Maybe not so important for large corporations, but for small businesses, finding out what locals are saying about them on Twitter could revolutionize customer service.
4. Twitter Search - Another Twitter tool, this one from Twitter itself. Twitter Search allows you to see in real time everything being said about a keyword, link or user activity.
5. Twilert.com - If you don't have time to actively monitor Twitter, here's something a little less time intensive. Twilert sends you regular e-mail updates about the keywords you're following. You can choose the frequencies of these e-mails, with options ranging from daily to monthly.
6. Wholinkstome.com - Do you know who is linking to you? Well, this handy application will tell you. Wholinkstome provides backlink analysis and, according to them, doesn't rely on third-party data, but instead independently crawls the web checking out links. The program also provides anchor text reports, domain reports, and anchor URL reports.
7. Boardtracker.com - What kind of mention does your brand get amongst the discussion board chatter? Boardtracker will let you know! People like to vent in these types of settings, so staying abreast of forum threads is a handy tool indeed.
8. Socialmention.com – You’re keeping on top of Twitter, blogs and discussion boards. Now what about Facebook? Social Mention is there for you. It is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across social media applications, such as Facebook, FriendFeed, Digg, Flickr and YouTube. Great for getting a quick feel for the pulse of things.

These free online reputation management tools will help you sort through the buzz, chatter and general clamor of the Internet to focus in on your product, brand or business. And with that kind of price tag, even the smallest business can be more proactive about handling customer perceptions.