You may be missing out if you have not joined the crowd of Social Media Monitoring and Alerts.

Google Alerts is probably the most well known, but there are others. In fact, the coverage of sources is probably the biggest problem or challenge with that tool.

A company like Sentiment Metrics has spent several years designing their blog crawl, spam detection and analysis technologies. They have so far built up a database over over 20 million active blogs, for example.

In addition, they crawl all the leading blog search engines, RSS feeds, video and photo sharing sites, news networks and social media networks.

It can also do more extensive spam filtering. Not to mention ranking your mentions (sometimes referred to as “rivers of news”) by importance in terms of authority and sentiment. They can view mentions by just your region, or a certain age group or gender so we make demographic profiling possible.

Another powerful solution is Radian6, a worthwhile player for massive and detailed information about your mentions online. Check them both out!