Do you have a brand that you wish to track? Maybe you have a concern about your reputation online. Or maybe you want to avoid a customer e-revolt. In the past, the only way you could track your company or brand was via the occasional vanity search. If you wanted something more, you had no choice but to seek out a company for such a service. Forget about doing any real market research without blowing a small budget. Now there is good news. In the past year, the ability to track brands, your company and do market research has come a long way. Sure you can still use a paid service, but for the most part they are just repackaging free sources of information you can get yourself. We covered some of these earlier, but we wanted to focus specifically on the tools offered by Google and Twitter (mashups). Using these websites you can get some valuable market information

Google Tools
Google offers the following tools to track your brand, company or marketplace:

Google Search: This is the most basic tool. Just do a quick “Ego” search on the terms of your choice. It’s an easy way to see what Google has discovered about your company or brand. Also, with the new search options Google unveiled recently, you can zero in on the most recent entries. We also recommend checking out Google Blog Search, which will allow you to see what is being said about you in the blogosphere.

Google Trends: analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for a terms. This will allow you to gauge the popularity of a recent ad campaign to see if people are searching for your product. There are two pieces of information you will see . A graph showing search volume and a Google News reference volume graph. This graph shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories. You also get a geographic break down. If your story is really hot, it could make it to the Hot Trends list. Google Trends information is updated daily, and Hot Trends is updated hourly. There is also Google Trends for Websites. When you enter your domain in the search box, Trends for Websites shows you a graph reflecting the number of daily unique visitors to your website (more details on how it’s calculatedhere). You can also see a list of regions where visitors came from, other websites they may have visited, and terms they may have also searched for.

Google Insight: is Google Trends on steroids. Google Insights for Search and Google Trends use the same data, but Insights for Search is has much more its advanced features. You can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

Google Alerts: This is by far the most important (yet overlooked tool) from Google. What Google Alerts allows is instantaneous email or feed alert when your brand or company is mentioned in the news, written about in a blog or is a new result in Google results. Got more questions? Read the FAQ here.

Twitter Tools
Twitter is a hot micro-blogging tool, but it offers companies and brands a great way to really know what their customers are thinking. Searches on Twitter can be done by checking the terms you are interested in. Nevertheless, we also recommend you checking your searches with hashtags as well. A hashtag is a number or pound sign (#) which some users will add before a term. Twitter bought a company called Summize last year which they have integrated into their own search engine. The other tools below use Twitter results to spit out search results, but none owned by Twitter. Mainly these tools focus on what are the hot topics in the so-called Twitterverse. The benefit of these tools is to ensure you brand or company is not undergoing an e-revolt by dissatisfied customers.

Twitter Search: This is the place to search Twitter directly. It is based on the technology they got from Summize. If new results come in while you are reading, you will be notified that you can refresh to see them. Also you can subscribe to results in the Atom feed format, so you never miss new additions.

Twitturly: tracks and ranks what URLs people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL. This service will allow you to see the penetration your site gets into the universe of twitter.

TweetMeme:TweetMeme is a service which tracks popular links on Twitter. Webmasters can install a code on their website to allow people the ability to (re)tweet their content. You can also search their site to see how you are doing.

Tweetag: The Tweetag homepage displays the 40 most frequent topics being discussed on Twitter (based on our automatic tagging system). The size of each tag represents its relative importance. If there is an e-revolt under way it will hit the front page.

Twitscoop: this is by the far the most interesting use if Twitter results. You can search for a specific tag, conversation, topic by entering it into the search box. The results of the corresponding tweets will come up in an activity graph. Search results will refresh automatically.

Any other tools for real-time search?
The final tool we wanted to share with you is called Scoopler and is solely focused on Social Media. They are constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. As new results get added, the page will be updated without refresh.

So there you have it. The above websites are free to use and to track your brand or company. Simple aren’t they? But don’t just stop there. These websites offer so much more valuable information. They can be used to discover hot topics, important keywords, track your competitors, discover attitudes of users and even discover the type of advertising that works (i.e. what ads go viral). Really the only limit is your time and imagination. Have fun!