I promised to add HR Resources and updates to my Innovative HR page as I play with new tools or come across examples. One of the questions I’ve been asked by HR professionals as they start to explore social media is how can I monitor what’s being said about my company?

There are several ways to monitor social media. Many large companies task their marketing or PR departments or external firms with this. But for those of you who will need to do some monitoring on your own, here are a couple of free tools you can use.

Image via CrunchBase

Addictomatic searches several live websites to see what people are saying about a certain topic. You can type in your company’s name or a product line and see what’s been blogged about, posted on youtube, twitter, etc etc.

Social Mention is a great tool that searches a variety of sites (or you can filter to certain types of sites). It not only finds mentions of your Brand, but provides a rating of positive vs negative or neutral sentiments, what keywords are associated with the brand, who’s talking about it and more.

There are several other tools that focus on single platforms, blogs, or news sites, as well as tools to monitor your own personal Facebook, twitter, and other accounts. These two seem to be the simplest and most comprehensive free tools that I know of so far.

So what are you waiting for? Get a twitter account and start tweeting!