From Denmark to Detroit, social media is a worldwide phenomenon that seems to be part addiction and part necessity. With Facebook's recent announcement that it's hit 500 million users and Twitter's move toward advertising with @earlybird it's becoming more apparent that if you want to get the word out about your business you need to step into the social media arena. However, all the excitement about social media doesn't mean much if you can't decipher what it means and what it's doing. Analytics to social media are like a compass to a navigator - if you don't understand where you're at you won't know where to go.

If the thought of analytics and numbers makes you shudder you're not alone. There are more people than not who feel intimidated by numerical data. The two toughest aspects of social media analytics are interpreting information and deciding what analytic tools best meet your needs. Fortunately, basic analytics doesn't require a PhD in statistics and the internet is filled with outstanding free tools and resources to help make metric crunching easy. So, if you can't afford enterprise-level services like Scout Labs, Radian6 or Sysomos, you'll want to check out some of the freebies below to help you get a grip on your analytics.

Blogs

Use PostRank to help rank your blog content and news and and to determine what your fans are reading, sharing and organizing. It also identifies what your most popular posts are in your RSS feed.

Think of BlogPulse as a search engine for blogs and their posts. It's similar to Technorati, but it provides additional views such as trending and conversations so that you can see search competitive topics and how other blogs are ranking.

Comments

Beyond standard search for keywords and brand names you’ll want to penetrate what’s being discussed in blog commenting systems too. That’s where YackTrack comes in. Simply enter your keywords or terms to see a nicely organized list that you can drilldown to get specific mentions from.

Branding

One of the more substantial branding tools available is Social Mention. It aggregates user generated content from across multiple social media platforms and streamlines outcomes into a very simple and easy to interpret web page. The one thing Social Mention doesn't do is show a report over time. A work around this missing feature is to create an Excel spreadsheet and manually enter daily data that you gather. Otherwise, it's a great (and free) tool.

Perhaps more of an entertainment tool rather than a true metric evaluator, How Sociable measures your brand's keywords throughout 32 different social media sites. There's some confusion around the 'visibility score' that How Sociable has developed and not all data appears to be accurate. For example, if you run a search on iPhone it yields a visibility score of 9,453 and a Google PageRank score of zero. Odd to say the least. Looks like brand visibility metrics might have a few glitches, but it’ still worth exploring.

Trends & Topics

Head over to Addict-o-Matic and enter a unique search term, brand or product name or just about anything and it will perform a search that delivers the buzz (or results) broken down by social media platform. It's a very convenient snapshot that let's you look at your social reach and the social sites where you have more presence in comparison to others.

Twitter

There are so many Twitter tools available that deciding which one to use can be a daunting task. For the purpose of benchmarking your brand against your competition, Twitalyzer is ideal. It shows you what social media strategies are working and what’s not, which makes it easy to adjust social media campaigns to maximize better results.

The power of influence is a core component in any social media campaign. Knowing who has better reach and strength and engaging with them can help persuade your audience to promote your brand. Klout measures influence as it relates to your brand through Twitter. You can identify which customers and communities are more likely to become brand evangelists and work with them to drive conversations.

Another hand Twitter tool is TweetStats. You can graph how many tweets per hour, day and month, as well as look at your tweet timeline and reply statistics. TweetStats is a fantastic way to track your level of interaction and look at areas that need improvement.

Google

Google Analytics (GA) may leave you feeling unnerved, but it actually does a tremendous job on tracking numbers and data. We'll save GA how-tos for a future post. In the meantime, use PageRank Checker to see what Google thinks of your site. Using a scale from zero to 10, with 10 holding the most authority, you can run a quick search to find out how you rank.

In order for GA to actually work on your website you need to install tracking code on each page that you want the Google bot spiders to crawl. To make sure that you've set-up your code use SiteScan to confirm that you've performed a correct installation. Although SiteScan and PageRank Checker aren't direct analytic tools they are helpful in gauging Google-related tasks and standards.

Competitive

Quarkbase has been touted as the ‘imdb.com for websites’. By entering a website’s URL you are presented with names of people associated with the site, traffic data, social popularity, site description and sites that are similar. This is one of the best free competitive research tools available. Data can be used to help you better position your brand and establish goals and objectives.

There you have it. Granted, there are so many tools, free and paid, that accessible on the web, we hope that this short list gets you moving in the right direction.

What are some of the other free tools that you're using? How do you make them work for your brand and what do you like best about them? Share with us.

Since we're in the early stages of tax season and I'm pretty sure that all of us are scrambling through old files, receipts and papers, I thought that it would be helpful to share some information on a Mac application that I came across.

If being eco-conscious and getting organized were on your New Year's list of resolutions for 2010, then Mariner Software's Paperless product is just for you. Paperless is a program that uses OCR (optical character recognition) technology to translate scanned receipts, warranties, manuals, documents and other important paper-based items into an electronic library.

Once you've scanned in your items, Paperless allows you to enter customized and detailed information that can be used to create unique reports, export receipt images for tax purposes, access product manuals or reference important legal documents in the event of an unforeseen disaster. Not only is Paperless extremely multi-functional, but it's exceptionally easy to use.

Paperless recommends using a TWAIN compliant scanner to ensure that functionality of its installed drivers matches up to the capabilities of Paperless. According to Paperless, Fujitsu and Pentax have the best drivers on the market. I will say that I'm using this program with an HP 6210 All-in-One and it's been great. No problems to report at all.

Using Paperless has gotten me used to requesting electronic versions of receipts for purchases that I've made. It's much easier to use the drag-and-drop feature instead of manually scanning receipts in. After my receipts are entered, I organize them using the Paperless Collection feature. What's nice about this is that I have the option to assign my receipts to category names of my choosing and then viewing them in collections based on the category.

The Smart Collection feature makes it simple to organize and view receipts by category.
For instance, any office-related purchase falls into the category of 'office supplies'. Next, I create a 'smart collection' that automatically filters my receipts looking for that category and voila! - I'm able to see all my office supply receipts in one easy place. Although Paperless contains a report option, in my opinion, it's one of the weaker features. Users are limited by drop-down boxes and pre-installed search parameters that make it difficult, if not impossible, to produce reports that evaluate accounting-level details. It would be nice if a set of pre-installed report templates were available to select. If Mariner is listening, I hope you might be able to add in your next upgrade.

Lastly, Paperless is marketed at a fair price point based on the applications functions, features and capabilities. Coming in just under $50 ain't too shabby. If you're still not quite sure about the program, do a trial-run before you purchase. If anyone has discovered other Mac products or solutions for organizing receipts and finances please feel free to share.