Inspired by David Alston’s (of Radian 6) marvelous interview on Blog Talk Radio I thought perhaps I could provide, 3 Quick and Easy ways an SMB could start listening online to what’s going on in their space right now, and it will cost them nothing! So let’s do this!

1) On LinkedIn, there’s an application called Company Buzz which lets you tap into this information flow to find relevant trends and comments about your company. You can install the application and instantly see what people are saying. You can customize and topics and add new ones to watch.You can see historical charts to track buzz over time and you can get the top words associated with your topic and quickly drill into see related tweets. There is of course an assumption here that you have created a LinkedIn account. If you have not, do that first.

2) Google Alerts I can’t say it any better than Google here, so let me quote them:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

The interface is simple, even more-so to set up and you are ready to go!

3) I know you have probably heard of Twitter, but one way to dip the toe in the water to see what the buzz is about, is by listening first. You can do this by developing searches that speak to your search terms, industry, company, you etc. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through their platform. Which is, undeniably, a lot!

You can even take it to the next level by crafting your searches using their many advanced search operators, and you can also use the advanced search page to easily incorporate search operators into your queries.

Boom. That’s it. You have just set up 3 ways to start listening and it may not even have taken you an hour. Got another that takes less time and is free? Share it!