What should you monitor about your company in social media?

There are several things I can think of to monitor via Social Media. Most include what your top competitors are doing. For Top competitors and your company, I would monitor:

• Press Releases: This is what the company wants you to hear. Comparing this to reality or other data sources allows you to sort out what is really going on.
• Twitter feeds: The customer service feed will give you a sense of some of the unfiltered goings on.
• Blog/Forum: Keeping track of what the company blogs about to see any trends
• Facebook Fan Page: If they even have one. Check out what events and communications they give to people who are real fans
• Glass Door: This site shows how people really feel about the company they work for. If you have a big competitor, monitor this site to see any tends in company politics

For your overall industry, I would track things like:

• Key Industry Insiders: These people have the pulse of that is going on behind the scenes. If they blog, make sure to monitor their RSS
• Market Analysts: Some can be full of themselves but if most agree, it's probably a big deal.
• Emerging Companies: It's always good to monitor the up and comings to see who might be competing with you next.

It's important to not only track your company but your competitors to gauge where you are at compared to them.

This is a lot to monitor but I have found that a few Google Alerts (or similar) do the job nicely.

There are various tools I use Ubervu for URL monitoring and Tweetdeck for twitter both are free and are pretty good at monitoring what goes on out there.

With regards to what to monitor.

One possible list would be

You company name Your domain name + perma urls if you have some important ones. Product/Service name Keywords that describe the business you are in or the kind of product you sell.

I would also monitor

Competitors names Domain names of competitors Perhaps even names of individuals

It all depends on how much time and money you are prepared to spend.

There are also more professinal services like Lithium and if you are really serious you should be looking into SocialCRM software.

You want as much as you can, It's a huge pain to go there and manually try to keep track of stuff so make them come to you by using:

• http://www.ubervu.com/ - social tracking search engine
• RSS Feed of everything related with you with a good RSS Reader
• Google Alerts (covers pretty much the whole internet, delivers daily results - what else you can want?)

Search keywords should be your company name,product name, URL and obviously usernames for social platforms such as @product_name (assuming you were smart and chose a good name that you can actually google and not a dictionary word)

I personally use tweetdeck as well to get instant results out of twitter, you can watch some keywords, quite useful stuff.