Social media is the new frontier in reaching out to the masses and even to a select demographic for marketers. Organizations from nonprofits to major corporations are blogging, twittering, updating statuses, creating Face Book pages, reviewing, stumbling, digging, etc... all in the hopes of connecting and sending a message.

Social media seems to have the legs to carry the weight of the future in conversations for just about anything that might exist in and out of this world. It is a blossoming field for job seekers too, according to Social Media Science: It is the number one job opportunity in corporate America for the next 10 years! Wow!

It is becoming tantamount for companies to know what people are saying about them thru social media. The good, bad and not so pretty about their brands and the reputation of their organization.

This week we are reviewing different analytic programs that exist to give you the skinny on your social media efforts. Today we focus on a solution designed to be utilized by PR and brand management firms; small companies will also benefit from using SM2 by Techrigy.

Techrigy, Inc., a Rochester, NY-based software company released their new solution last Summer. SM2 monitors what is being said about your company, brand, products and competitors in several avenues from the blogosphere, social networks, sites with user-generated video (like You Tube), microblogs (like Twitter), etc... This ongoing conversation includes a constantly changing cross-section of stories and opinions. The functionality is similar to Google Alerts, but is capable of providing in-depth analytics. SM2 can be used to analyze trends, regional and demographic differences. If you have a very busy site, which is mentioned several times a day then SM2 is enough of a powerhouse that it will track information and select the most relevant data for usage.

Capabilities of SM2:

• Real time, keyword-driven search of blogs, wikis, social networks, video and photo-sharing sites, micro-blog threads, forums and more
• The ability to track brands, people, products, competitors and partners
• Extensive reporting including sentiment (positive/negative opinion), geo-location, demographics, timelines and extensive charting options
• Deep drill-down analysis to manage reputations, identify emerging trends and follow influential opinion-makers

Techrigy allows users to have a fully functioning FREE or as they state, "Freemium" account with them (you receive 5 search terms and 1000 search results) and is scaled to the use of the individual or the company. The first paid subscription starts at $500.00/month.

Techrigy states, "SM2 solves a major problem: understanding and responding to extremely rapid changes in opinion on the social web."

Techrigy also claims:

“When the blogosphere runs with a new piece of information, reputations can be destroyed, new markets can emerge and trends can come and go literally overnight,” says Aaron Newman, CEO of Techrigy. “Conventional search cannot index these media formats fast enough nor can they provide the in-depth intelligence that SM2 offers. We built this technology specifically to track brand and name reputations in social media.”

The only negative information I came across was it doesn’t allow the user an opportunity to build-your-own dashboard. Other than that, it appears to be worth a shot for free and then if you want to take advantage of what it has to offer, I suggest signing on for the monthly service. Apparently, it has so many features many users find it difficult to stop compiling all of the reports it has on several topics related to social media.

I will be posting more reviews of other tools used to track the online conversations about you and your company!