I follow Jenny’s article (or you could say I “Twitt” her in a proper geek language) to speak about tracking and monitoring online PR.

As she mentioned with the ClickThrough Marketing article example, there are many PR professionals who still do not know how to best measure the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. And this is more than understanding when we know the amounts of new blogs, social networks and plethora of online communities, created and interfering in today’s online space!

Nevertheless, there are many tools online that already allow you to keep records on the buzz created through your campaigns while assessing bloggers’ feelings, number of links, bookmark views…etc.

According to Lee Odden, the following software tools can help make things easier for Online PR professionals:

Google Alerts for brand monitoring
TweetBeep – twitter tracking tool!
Small biz: Trackur
Enterprise: RADIAN6, Buzzlogic

Some others that are worth looking at are:

Collective Intellect
Keotag
Crimsonhexagon
Vibemetrix

Brandseye
Reputation.distilled
Reputationdefender.com
Sentimentmetrics.com
Reputrace.com

We are looking at the moment at Trackur which is an online reputation monitoring tool that has been developed for companies who take a serious look at what is being said about them in the blogosphere so that you can take action when need be, and prevent a storm of bad e-press whenever possible (as we know how easy a business can live and die by online referrals and word of mouth!!)

The best way to get a handle on Trackur is probably to give it a try while signing up for the free 14 day trial (what we do at the moment and for which we will come with thoughts really soon), but any good comments by those who had already experienced it by the past are always welcome!!!

However and according to the Demo video that I have already watched, Trackur seems to have a much more integrated package as, compared to Google News Alert, it allows you to monitor what is being said about you and your company in the blogosphere.

What Trackur does exactly is to search blogs, forums and other online publications in order to track items that are pertinent to you.

According to Andy Beal, users can be up and running with Trackur in just 5 minutes which “removes the hassle out of maintaining dozens of manual reputation searches.”

He explains: “We take the hard work out of monitoring social media. We monitor news, blog posts, images, videos – even Twitter! Users can set up multiple searches, use sophisticated filtering to remove items that are not relevant to them, bookmark items, share items, sort items, then subscribe by email or RSS – or just use our beautiful AJAX interface”.

So far, Trackur appears a bit more sophisticated than Google Alerts with some obvious advantages such like the management platform or the fact it covers data sources outside of Google’s Index, but for this extra advantages you will have to consider an extra price of $18 – $88 while Google remains free…

Let’s see…