Reputation and brand monitoring are important parts of a well-rounded Internet marketing strategy. But keeping abreast of how your customers and prospects are speaking about your company and your products can be daunting.

These ten free tools can start you down the right path to understanding your business’s reputation.

SocialMention

Social Mention

SocialMention allows you to search for your brand, product, or anything else that’s relevant to your business. It then displays social media occurrences of that term. Social Mention searches multiple social websites in real time. Sorting features are available.

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Whos Talkin

Whos Talkin

Whos Talkin offers a comprehensive search of blogs and forums for key search terms. You can search for your brand, and be linked to any mentions of it throughout the interactive portions of the web.

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SamePoint

Samepoint

Samepoint requires registration. But the search results include graphs and charts that can help you reach out to influencers on relevant topics, or to those who have otherwise mentioned your brand.

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Technorati

Technorati

Technorati is a catalog of blogs, many of which are technology and business based. Searching for your name there can reveal recent blog posts that have mentioned your company — including product reviews — and other blog posts of interest.

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Google Alerts

Google Alerts

No one knows what ends up in Google’s search index faster than Google. With Google Alerts can be email you each time your company or product is mentioned on the web. Find out what is being said quickly, and then you can respond accordingly.

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Twilert

Twilert

By signing in with your Twitter account, Twilert allows you to set daily or weekly emails to yourself that list mentions of terms you choose that occurred on Twitter. You can enter your company name, employee names, or product names — or just about anything else that will help you understand your market better.

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TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet aggregates statistics you already have if you are using services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Analytics. You can gain insight into how your content is shared, or not. Having this data in one place is helpful, and can augment other reputation checking services.

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Rankur

Rankur

A free account at Rankur is limited. But you can still create brand-monitoring searches and have those reports saved and sent via email daily. You can search any term, including your brand name. You will not, however, be able to save more than one search at a time without upgrading. It’s still a good, basic search tool, especially if you just want to monitor one term.

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Trackur

Trackur

The free social-mention monitoring tool at Trackur similarly only allows just one search; it updates once daily. The free version searches Twitter, only. To get results from forums or other social networks, a paid version is required.

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Topsy

Topsy

Think of Topsy as a near real-time search engine. It’s a helpful place to search for your company name on days where there should be a lot of buzz. Its results are well formatted and easy to navigate. Several filtering options make digesting the data quick and easy.