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Our last post focused on how to own your online presence, but also equally important is monitoring what other people are saying about you online. Whether you’re a company, a freelancer, or just an individual who wants to be more active online, it’s important to gauge both the amount of activity and the sentiment surrounding your brand online.

At Domain.com, we’ve jumped in head-first to social monitoring, and while we are the first to admit that we’ve still got more to learn, here are some of the keys to our methods:

Start with Twitter

If you’re being talked about online, chances are the place that will provide the most immediate and highest volume of content is Twitter. First off, make sure you have a Twitter account. If you don’t, it severely limits your ability to respond to real-time social interaction, which makes social monitoring somewhat pointless in the first place.

Next, start using Twitter search. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, and will only continue to get better as Twitter grows. Search for your brand, related terms, competitors, and other relevant terms. For example, some of the searches we run include Domain.com, domaindotcom, domaincom, domain, @domaindotcom, and other variants. This will give you a good indication of who is talking about you on Twitter, how many people are talking about you, and what they’re saying.

The Best of the Rest

Twitter is a great start in monitoring the real-time web. However, there are many other places to pick up on your brand mentions. Here are some of the others that can return valuable search results:

Friendfeed is an aggregator where users can integrate Twitter, Blogs, and other social profiles into one online stream.

Facebook continues to move towards being a more open social network, and its search functionality is increasing. Soon you’ll be able to search the status updates of all Facebook users who elect to have their profile information public.

Social Bookmarking Sites such as Digg, Reddit, or Delicious are a good place to search to get a good sense of your brand’s relevance and authority online.

Question/Answer Sites such as Yahoo Answers allow you to search through all the questions being asked to see if anyone has questions about your brand.

Social Search Tools such as Oneriot or WhosTalkin can provide interesting insights and uncover some search results you might otherwise not stumble across. They aggregate searches from a variety of the smaller and larger social networks available.

Check for Comments

Forums and comments on blogs are still common methods of discussion, and there are some great tools to search blogs and forums across the entire internet.

Boardreader searches numerous message boards and forums acrosss the internet.

Omgili is another useful forum search that often returns fewer results than Boardreader, but also different ones from time to time.

Backtype is a highly useful blog comment search tool, as is Icerocket.

Google is Your Friend

Google is great for everything that isn’t covered by one of the above tools. Make sure you set Google Alerts for terms you want to follow. Use Google News and Google Blog Search to find news articles and blog posts that include a mention of the terms you want to follow.

This is all starting to sound like a lot of work, right? Numerous searches at well over a dozen websites can add up to a good amount of time involvement, even if you’re efficient about it. Once again, Google offers a great solution: Google Reader. If you look closely at all the search results pages on various social sites, nearly all of them include a link to that search as an RSS feed. Set up an RSS reader, add each of your various searches to the reader, do some organizing, and suddenly you’ve got all of your searches delivered automatically right to you! This way, rather than performing searches once a day or even multiple times daily, you can let your RSS reader do all the work for you.

Does it Matter?

Social networking and social search is becoming an increasingly important way that internet users browse the web, get feedback, and ultimately find you. Social monitoring is not as easy as simply typing your name into Google to check search results, but it can provide a valuable and much more time-sensitive view of what’s going on relevant to your brand on the internet. It’s definitely worth it to take the time to check in on the social web.

The importance of having a presence online continues to increase, but how to establish and maintain that presence is changing rapidly. New social networks are popping up all over the internet, and being active on the major social networks online is an important way to make sure you can be found, whether you’re an online business, a blogger, a job hunter, or just an involved web user. However, many people are missing out on the fundamentals of having a robust presence online. Here are some important tips to consider:

Joe Smith? You’re Not Alone

Unless you’re lucky enough to have a completely unique name or organization name, you’ve got competition online whether you know it or not. If you’re a “Joe Smith” or other common name, there are many other Joe Smiths out there that also want to be found online, and they compete with you as far as search engine rankings and on social networks using the same name. There’s also a good chance that at least one of them is semi-famous. How do you make yourself stand out from the crowd? Read on.

A Domain is Still Home Base

The newest social network might be getting all the buzz and attention from media and blogs, but the best method of establishing an online presence is still owning your own domain. Buy yourself your domain name – if www.yourname.com is available, snap it up! If the .COM isn’t available, you’ve got many other solid choices such as .NET, .ORG, or .ME.

What to do with your Domain

Owning your personal domain name is a big step towards being visible online. However, the driving force behind being found online is content. If you have a domain name but it isn’t associated with a website, you won’t get very far. Search engines and social networks alike both value new and fresh content and quality links to that content. A static website is a good start, but depending on your needs a blog can be a better choice. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform available, and you can install it on your own hosting for free! We actually offer an automatic installation of WordPress from our application vault for hosting customers – making it even easier for you to get started. WordPress is great for everyone from beginners to power-users, because it doesn’t require coding or html knowledge, and it has a great intuitive user-interface. WordPress is such a versitile platform, it even powers this blog:

With the growing number of social networks and websites that you can choose to have a presence on, it can be important to have a home-base to link back to. Think of it like the backbone of your online nervous system.

Expanding Outward to Draw Others in

With the proliferation of social networks has come the ability to be in many places at once online. The downside there is that only being in one place online is becoming increasingly ineffective. Creating a profile on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is a great start. These are some of the biggest social networks, and they’re all great for connecting, sharing information and content and being visible online. There’s more to each of these networks than could be explained in one blog post, but they’re all very intuitive, and the best way to learn them is to dive right in and set up a profile.

If you’re already on the major social networks, consider some others that may be relevant to your interests:

• Flickr – A social network for sharing photos
• Dopplr – Share your travels online
• Yelp – Food buff? Review your favorite restaurants
• Youtube or Vimeo – Share your videos

Search is still what drives a vast majority of online traffic, so page 1 search rankings for the major search engines are key to getting noticed. If you’ve got a common name, this can be difficult. This is where having your own domain comes in. Having www.yourname.com or similar, among other factors, will help you rank high in search engines. Those social networks can also be a great way to rank well for your name. Having twitter.com/yourname ranks well organically and you just might see your Twitter account jump up the search rankings. If you’ve got a rare name, we challenge you to dominate the search rankings for your name!

If all else fails, Google has extended you a great olive branch with Google Public Profiles. You can create a basic profile in Google that will automatically show up at the bottom of page 1 search results for your name.

End Result: Own Your Brand Online

The internet has undergone a huge mentality shift since the early 2000s. In the early days of the internet, privacy was the norm. Unless you were creating an online business, many people preferred to be anonymous and hidden from the public eye. Now with the growth of the social web, being visible online can be important for a variety of reasons. Job hunting, connecting with friends, sharing media, scheduling events, participating in organizations, and creating new connections can all be aided by being present and active online. If you’re new to social networking online, take your time to learn what you’re doing rather than diving in head first, but now is most certainly the time to get your feet wet.

So what are you waiting for? Find a domain and start connecting!