Given it a catchy 2.0-social-media-140 title, line up the same old speakers, offer a bunch of over-priced tickets and, hey presto, you’ve got a hit on your hands!

With this concept firmly shelved, we decided that Social Media Marketing 2010 (taking place in London on 17th June) should say clearly what it’s about in the title, only involve genuinely innovative speakers – even if some aren’t that well known – that we’d stick to a specific theme (Harnessing the Viral Power of Social Networks) and that we’d vet the presenters and presentations so tightly they’d squeak. The result, I’m pleased to say, is shaping up quite well.

We’ve got several bags of innovation, including a hot-off-the-streets case study using Foursquare, insights from the world’s most successful viral marketing agency,  a guide to writing effective Tweets and a session on “how to use social networking theory to improve your marketing” which, I’m told, includes complex mathematics.  #SMMUK10 will also be the first UK event to feature both  Brian Solis and Chris Brogan - two of the most influential figures in online marketing globally – who will be contributing their insights via video. We’ve also got Richard Sedley (cScape), Philip Sheldrake (Influence Crowd), Mat Morrison (former Global Digital Planning Director at Porter Novelli), Murray Newlands and yours truly, among other speakers.

This isn’t going to be just another social media conference. If you aren’t 100% delighted by it, I’ll eat my hat.

For tickets and more info visit: www.socialmediamarketing.co.uk

Trackle's social media monitoring dashboard

Here’s a list of 8 free (or very cheap) social media monitoring tools we’ve tried out in the last few weeks. They are all pretty light-touch, but great for anyone starting out in social media monitoring – and a lot of fun into the bargain. (We also reviewed 5 top budget social media monitoring tools a few months back).

1) Trackle - Trackle started out as newsletter service, enabling anyone to create a free email newsletter on any topic, which would then be automatically created from web content and delivered regularly. They also offer a corporate version which includes a basic social media monitoring tool, which delivers daily updates to your inbox. The interface is quite cluttered and confusing, but it seems to work reasonably well (though some blog results weren’t captured in my test). There’s a rather nice “credibility” filter, which you can use to pinpoint the comments/posts from influential authors – though I’m not sure what basis this is judged on. Trackle offers a 30 day free trial, but it’s only $9.99 afterwards anyway. Within that price you can track 10 keywords/phrases. The Premium version is $99 for unlimited keywords.

2) TweepSearch - I recently wrote about Tweepsearch as a tool for finding influencers on Twitter very enthusiastically. The service enables you to analyse your Twitter followers to find out who’s influential on which topics. If you like playing with Boolean search queries to get really interesting results, it’s the Twitter Profile monitoring tool for you.

3) FollowerWonk – Just when I thought I’d found the best Twitter monitoring tool (see above), Marshall Sponder trumped me somewhat with followerwonk.com. It searches Twitter profiles for keywords in the same way as Tweepsearch, albeit with an easier interface (there’s a handy field for entering locations, rather than having to use search terms) but it produces the results in a more comprehensive way. As a result, one of the nicest features (which probably isn’t intended) is that you can easily copy and paste the results into a spreadsheet.

4) Klout - One of the most user-friendly and, dare I say it, more serious Twitter “influence monitoring” tools on the market is Klout.com. You can search for a specific topic and it gives you a list of the most influential Twitter users based on (what looks like) some fairly sophisticated mapping of their connectedness and ability to instigate re-tweets and mentions. If you put your Twitter details in Klout will use the same calculations to decide if you’re a Casual, Connector, Climber or Persona (with Persona’s being both connected AND influential).

5) Realmon9 – This one’s in the list on its pure potential alone. It’s still in Beta, but it’s a social media monitoring Google App. – which means, you can use it (for free) with any Google account. You can currently view a demo (you need to sign into your Google account to view it) and email to request a full account, but it looks to offer quite comprehensive listings. The developer, AJ Chen, is already working on plugging the app into Salesforce.com, to enable end-to-end CRM (the kind Radian6 and others are striving towards). One to watch!

6) Tweetreach – Not new, but still a great site for blowing away Twitter sceptics in a single click. Just add a short URL from a popular Tweet you’ve recently posted, click the button and it shows you how many people (and who) your Tweet was sent to. Great for identifying who your most valuable and viral Followers are.

7) Cligs – This short URL company offers social media monitoring in a really simple and elegant way. Paste in your long URL and it gives you a nice short version, plus an HTML version and an HTML one with a title, if you want it. In addition to the usual number of hits, Cligs gives you the times of hits, geographical location of visitors, which search engine bots have found your “clig”, Twitter and FriendFeed mentions, blog and comment links, Delicious bookmarks, plus, interestingly referral statistics – i.e. which links sent you traffic. The big problem for short URL companies is that Twitter uses bit.ly. To get around this Cligs offers apps and plugins for Gmail, iGoogle, Firefox, WordPress and TwitterFeed. It’s a first step for short URL social media monitoring – but I can see this area developing.

8) Ubervu – Ubervu’s social media comparison site lets you see how you’re ranking against your competitors in terms of social media reach and impact. It’s basically like Compete.com, but for social media. Ubervu’s main product is a freemium social media monitoring tool which is well worth a try. It’s quite powerful, but takes a bit of getting used to.

Interested in learning how to monitor social media? Tickets are on sale now for our social media monitoring master-class: Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, 31st March 2010, London (UK)

The fact is, the Twitter user-base is still a tenth of the size of Facebook and the majority of users remain casual (if not dormant) Twitterers who’ve posted more Tweets than they have followers. Granted, if you’re in the media, marketing or PR, you’ll find millions of active users to follow and engage with, but what about those of us who work in more publicity shy, less showy industries and business sectors?

If, for example, you’re an Insurance Lawyer you’ll have a choice of 25 people to follow. That’s pretty lame as far as global communities go, but it’s a veritable thronging crowd compared to the connections available Bond Brokers. If you want to discuss the complex business of buying and selling bonds, you can choose to talk to David from Chicago or Jeffrey from Georgia. Good luck with that one.

Creative industries seem to be disproportionately well represented on Twitter. A quick search for “sculptors” produces 676 results and over 9,000 people have the word “printer” (or print) in their profiles. Evidently this (relatively) new medium offers fresh ground for innovators and explorers of ideas. As Copyblogger points out, highly creative people generally “have the courage to try new things and risk failure. Every big breakthrough starts as a harebrained idea.” And, rightly or wrongly, Twitter still falls into the “hair-brained idea” category for majority of business people.

Clearly, some perspective is needed here. One the one hand, many (probably most) industries are yet to populate the Twittersphere, but if the current growth of the service is maintained, that’s likely to happen in the next couple of years. On the other hand, there’s already huge value in finding and engaging with the press and media types in your industry, who you’re likely to find on Twitter today (in fact there are several lists to help you).  How else can you share snippets of news with influential journalists throughout the day without triggering a string of restraining orders?

In spite of my reservations, I still advise all of my clients to start using Twitter, simply so they understand social media at its most viral and get a feel for how communications are likely to develop. Anyone who thinks Twitter is not a business tool is hugely mistaken and likely to pay a heavy price within the next 2-3 years. Expect “meme” news and communication services to proliferate in the shadow of this little bird.