Are you’re ears burning? If you’re supplying content to the online community, chances are that people are talking about you.

Whether or not companies are actively engaging directly with their audience through social media channels, they should at least be aware of conversations taking place about either their brand or anything that may directly impact them.

Listening to the buzz around you brand is not only important from a reputation management standpoint, but also because it serves as a way to better understand ways of improving your brand.

We take a look at ways to help you monitor online conversation and trends that can affect your brand, as well as show you a few nifty tools that can make your life a whole lot easier.

EMAIL & RSS ALERTS

Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts

Alerts are a good way to get an overview of what is going on . They are not new tools, but remain useful nonetheless. You can use Google and Yahoo alerts to subscribe to keywords or urls. This is also a great way to detect copyright infringement.

You should be using search engine alerts to find out whenever your company name, url, public figures or products are mentioned.

Google Blog Search

Google blog search is a powerful tool to search through blogs that do not always index on the main Google search engine. You can also create alerts for these blogs.

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo pipes is a powerful tool to aggregate and mashup content from across the web. It has a fantastic visual interface which makes it easier for non-programmers like me. Although it’s still in beta, the possibilities are endless.

One way to use it is to monitor multiple feeds but only have alerts when a feed reaches activity levels worthy of a look.

TRENDS MONITOR

BlogPulse

BlogPulse allows you to identify trends generating buzz across blogs. The conversation tracker follows a discussion as it spreads from a single blog post and sprouts into an entire conversation.

Google Trends

A nice tool to measure the impact bloggers have on a brand. Google trends measures the level of interest in particular topics. These trends are based on real searches over a period of time.

The most interesting thing about it is that you can compare multiple sites in the same niche and you can see what geographic regions a particular keyword is popular in.

Compete

From page: “Track your rivals, then eat their lunch”

You can also use a tool like micro niche finder to track keyword trends and find new markets.

SOCIAL MEDIA SEARCH ENGINES

Serph

Serph is a social media search engine. An all-in-one system thats great for those are quite busy.

Keotag

Keotag is another decent social media search engine. Similar to Serph.

OTHER

Twitter

Twitter, a microblogging platform, has the potential to be a vital buzz monitor. Many influential industry folk use twitter and their conversations can be important for your brand.

As Twitter grows, we will find that it has the potential to break the buzz first. You can track keywords and have them sent direct to your mobile as soon as they are posted.

Tweetscan is a tool to search for keywords on twitter.

Here are 17 ways to visualise the twitter universe

Particls

Great little desktop tool that simplifies massive amounts of information. Beta testing is now closed, and we can hope for a release in the near future.

COMMENTS TRACKING

Conversations about you or directly related to you occur throughout the internet. If you are involved with these conversations, you can usually bookmark, subscribe to comment feeds, or have responses emailed to you. Obviously this can become messy when you begin to engage in a high number of conversations.

Commentful

Commentful cumulates data from blog posts, Digg, Flickr, Wordpress and many other types of content. You will receive an overview with followup comments and trackbacks.

coComment, co.mments, MyComments

These three comment managers allow you to track comments via rss. They make it easy for you to organize, bookmark and get notified of updates.

FORUM TRACKING

Not all forum threads are index by Google. Here are a few forum search tools which will help you uncover those hard to reach conversations.

Big Boards
Board Reader
Boardtracker
Twing
Yuku Find

This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list. They are buzz and trend monitoring tools that we have used and liked, basically our picks of the free litter. Let us know if we missed any others that deserve to be here.