I tell my clients they should participate in online conversations about their brand, yet how do you participate in an online conversation when you don’t know it even exists?

Google Alerts, Technorati and other services track blog/news/Web mentions of your brand, but what about message boards and forums?

Forums and message boards can be volatile, unpredictable places - and they’re very time consuming to
track.

twing is a search engine for forums and message boards - an invaluable tool for businesses

How do you track your brand across the message board universe without investing truly epic amounts of time?

Try Twing. It’s Free. It’s Effective. It’s Our Friend.

Twing - a free search service aimed squarely at forums and message boards - offers you the ability to search forums and message boards for mentions of your brand - a significant time saver for those tracking brands online.

While not specifically designed for business usesrs, twing does allow you to run simple searches (similar to Google), and even save complex searches.

You can also search by posts, topic or forum, and add key forums to your “favorites” list.

I entered the name of my fly fishing blog, and found several discussions on forums I didn’t know existed. All the mentions were positive, but the question remains: Who’s saying what about your business?

Try twing, and maybe you’ll find out.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.