THE SOCIAL TIMES — Position2 recently launched a new product in the social media analytics and engagement space. Brand Monitor is a platform that enables companies to listen, discover and engage with social media conversations in real time. A cloud based platform, Brand Monitor helps companies track and monitor conversations across millions of blogs, micro-blogs like Twitter, social media, forums, news, video and photo sharing sites...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — A large chunk of any online marketer's time is spent on engagement. Engaging bloggers and sites to chat about your content, to check out your products and if you prove valuable enough, sign up for a glittering platinum subscription. If we receive a conversion, we can be pretty sure that our new member is actively engaged with the site right? You want to engage visitors, have them convert, or at least stick around on a semi-regular basis. It’s all about traffic numbers. One of the largest problems online however, is that we still don’t have a cut and dried method for measuring engagement. Let’s examine the phrase ‘online engagement’ for a moment and I’ll show you what I mean...

TECHCRUNCH — As more businesses look to social media for marketing efforts and to drive sales, there is a need for a comprehensive, yet easy to use platform to manage interactions on social networks. Chicago-based startup Sprout Social is launching its social relationship management platform to the public today. The startup’s platform allows businesses to connect to customers and monitor key metrics and the overall competitive landscape using social media tools...

MASHABLE — Social media analytics company ViralHeat is giving away free access to a treasure trove of data from Twitter, Facebook and a number of other social properties, all housed within the site’s more than 4,000 topic-based profiles. The company’s revamped ViralHeat Social Trends offering gives users a fast and simple way to create their own auto-updating social media charts, which can be embedded as widgets elsewhere on the web, as well. Users can pull data and sentiment analysis from member-generated topic profiles spanning topics such as news, entertainment, music, sports and politics to create their own charts...

THE BRANDBUILDER BLOG — King Fish Media’s 2010 Social Media Usage, Attitudes and Measurability report (done in conjunction with Junta 42 and Hubspot) is available here. The report is solid*, and you should definitely download it. Now, let me share what I think is the most disturbing aspect of it. Some numbers from the report itself: Nearly three quarters of all companies surveyed (72%) claim to currently have a social media strategy, and of those that don’t, the vast majority (80%) will within the next year. 85% of companies are handling their social media efforts internally. So far so good, right? Right. Now check this out:...