This is a tool brought to us by Nielson BuzzMetrics that tracks the influence of any blog in the blogosphere. At the time of writing it tracked more than 78 million blogs. To use it, you enter one or more keywords or URLs of blogs. The tools you can use are:

1. A trend search tool that compares your keywords or chosen blogs and tracks them graphically over time;
2. A tool that tells you what the most popular trends are by category;
3. A conversation tracker that shows you the complete thread of a conversation happening between blogs based on the keyword or URL you input; and
4. A blog influence tool where you input the URL for a blog and it shows you who authors it, how active the blog is, how it ranks in comparison with other blogs, what it’s about and so on.

This is an excellent tool that can be used on a complementary basis.

Cubics is exactly like Google AdWords, but instead of placing your ads on Google, they are placed on various social networks such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Friendster. You simply set up an account, write your ad and choose your target audience or site. Audiences can be targeted demographically to age, gender, geographic location and so on.

At the time of writing, the company served over 1 billion ads per month. Should you have a social media application that you want to monetize by running advertising on it, you can do so as well, just as you would with Google AdSense. The company is owned by AdKnowledge

The cleverly named KickApps company is in the business of helping you create and manage your own branded social media marketing universe. At the time of writing, there were four applications that you could plug into your website:

1. A social network application where users create a profile and then interact with one another;
2. A forum for user-generated content where visitors share and comment on said content (video, photos, audio, blogs, etc.);
3. Programmable video players to help you videoize your content; and
4. A widget builder that allows your content to be fed to your community, which they then pass it on to their community in a viral marketing kind of way.

Their business model is advertising-based, meaning they run ads pulled from their ad network on your application. Or you can make a partnership arrangement where you pay a fee based on usage; you can choose to run your own ads on your applications, or no ads at all. At the time of writing, there was no cost to start building your applications to test out the service.

This company offers a suite of social marketing tools that have a wide array of analytic and metrics features built right. While there is a fee for their more advanced, hosted solutions, they offer a gratis tool that you can download. This tool adds a metrics tracker to your existing social media applications, such as tell-a-friend programs, “friend finder” tools and the like. Any social media process that you have on your site can be tracked and reviewed through pie charts and graphs that show usage and pass along trends.

This tool does need to be technically married to your applications, so do be aware that your IT staff will need to get involved to implement it.

Social Media Today is a moderated community for social media bloggers, marketers, PR and media professionals. You can browse through the copious, informative content to get up to speed on the social media marketing phenomenon. However, as fitting for a social media marketing website, you are encouraged to create a profile, tell everyone about yourself, rate posts and even blog directly within this blog.

Categories include marketing metrics, social commerce, social advertising, reputation management and more,. The content is fascinating, whether it’s short posts and conversations or longer submitted articles such as (at the time of writing), how to get hired in a Web 2.0 world, the ROI of social media or charts and graphs showing how the online consumer feels about and trusts social media. There’s a long list of contributors with whom you are encouraged to network.

This very simple to use tool tracks the major social websites to analyze any Web page’s social popularity. At the time of writing, the tool scanned Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Reddit, Sphere, Spurl, Technorati and Yahoo My Web. A scan for Web Digest For Marketers revealed that it was most popular at Sphere (a blogging news site), where there were 1,141 references to the Online Marketing Resource Center.

The focus of the articles and resources in this site is on how to make an impact in social media. Therefore, you will find links to articles on subjects ranging from how to link like a master networker in the world of social media (thereby increasing the inbound links to your site and thus your Google ranking) and to how to commit social media suicide.

You’ll find tips on how to develop quantifiable metrics to analyze the success of your social marketing, such as graphing page views and trackbacks on the major social media sites.

We especially liked the guide to what you should do every day, step by step, with just 15 minutes of your time devoted to social media marketing. Should you be into video production of your content, there’s even a guide on how to get your video to go viral.

Trackur offers a service that constantly monitors millions of blogs, news sites, images and videos for mention of your brand, which they call “reputation monitoring.” The service is like Google Alerts on steriods. While Google Alerts helps you find citations, that’s it. This site takes it a step beyond that. Once you find citations, you are able to do store and manage, track, bookmark and in general organize your results.

Trackur also tracks millions of blogs, etc., whereas Google Alerts only tracks those results that are found on Google. At the time of writing, a gratis trial was available at the site.

PS - You’ll also want to use this service to track the same results for your competitors.

This tool allows you to search the world of blogs by keyword, brand or topic to see who’s blogging about it and what they’re saying. The interface encourages you to compare one keyword vs. two more related keywords (or brands, if you are doing competitive research).

What is best about Trendpedia is that it graphs a timeline for you that shows the action of that keyword over the past three months. This enables you to analyze that keyword’s blogosphere trend. You can click on the graph at any point to see the actual statements that bloggers have made, with links to their blogs.

There are many ways that Trendpedia can be useful to you, whether you are researching a literal keyword or tracking the scoop on your own brand vs. that of your competition. For example, we compared the topic of Internet marketing vs. search engine optimization and found that the Internet marketing topic was far more prevalent than the search engine optimization topic, by a score of 85% vs. 15%.

This tool is brought to us by Attentio, a fee-based buzz-monitoring service.

Twitter (for those who don’t know) is an application that allows you to share short messages (called “tweets”) with your friends, or a group of friends or a following of people that you have grown.

For example, one of the top twitters out there is Leo Laporte, a journalist who covers technology. Instead of having you wait for his articles or blog posts, he sends quick messages all day long to his following of more than 29,000 people.

It is a bit difficult to develop and manage a following, so luckily there are many twitter tools out there to help you keep it together. This site compiles them, and at at the time of writing there were more than 100. Tools include:

• Twitslikeme, which allows you to find other people who share your interests on Twitter;
• Twitterverse, which presents a tag cloud of all the twitters;
• GroupTweet, which allows you to send private Twitter messages to specific groups; and
• Dozens of purely entertaining tools, such as “post like a pirate,” which translates your messages to pirate speak and then sends them to Twitter.

Vocus is a Web-based public relations tool that lets you find the right contacts for distribution of your content or press releases. To do so, you review their database of more that 800,000 outlets, which includes journalists, analysts, publicity opportunities and more.

Unlike traditional PR services, this tool includes the distribution and tracking of your content to social media outlets such as blogs, wikis and social networks. There are many case studies from clients like Goodwill, Southwest Airlines and even the huge PR firm Edelman. At the time of writing, a whitepaper was available at the site that focused on the impact of PR in the social media arena.

Widgetbox is a directory of thousands of widgets, or freestanding applications. While many widgets simply deliver information from point A to point B, such as a stock ticker, widgets can work as a social media marketing tool in two ways:

1. You can create a widget that users want to pass on to their friends, which virally markets your company; or
2. You can create a widget that allows users to send information right back at you, such as comments, polls and other forms of content.

You can search or browse Widgetbox by category, which includes everything from blogs to business to weather. By doing so, you can find inspiration for widgets of your own, or you can actually use a Widgetbox widget at no cost in your own Facebook, Bebo, LiveJournal or other social media site where you have a presence.