You can’t monitor the whole Internet. Nobody can, not even Google. So what do you do? It’s obvious that you can’t ignore it? You need to be monitoring something.
“But I don’t have budget for fancy monitoring tools.” You don’t need any budget. There are dozens of free or nearly free tools to use but you could probably just monitor Twitter if you had to.The easiest and cheapest way is set up your team with TweetDeck, let it run in the background at work and run a search for your keywords.
I’m not advocating that you only monitor Twitter (and the above solution only works while TweetDeck is running) but I think if you only did one thing, it would be to monitor Twitter? Why? Why not blogs or set up alerts?
Twitter is the water cooler of the Internet. One could argue that it’s becoming the World’s Water Cooler. But they’d be wrong. The World has many Internet Water Coolers.
Facebook is the World’s Largest Water cooler.
The Facebook Water Cooler started off as a brand of water bottles exclusively sold at college. It quickly became the fav