What are your customers and competitors saying about you and your business/brand online? Could an employee be intentionally/unintentionally divulging private details about your company? Are you on top of the latest industry news, research, and trends that would influence decisions you make about your business?

Google Alerts has long been touted as an effective way of monitoring all of the above, and then some. (Duct Tape Marketing's John Jantsch gave it a nice plug at last month's National Small Business Week conference; Dell's Bob Pearson also flagged it during Small Business Summit 2009 earlier this year.) For SmallBizResource, I've set alerts on a handful of keywords, including small business, microbusiness, and entrepreneur, as well as my own name. The latter helps me track (and thank) others who have referred to my posts, which, significantly, also broadens my network of colleagues.

On Monday I learned about a dynamic duo of Web tools with similar functionality, and both real-time cool in their own right. ComputerWorld positions its roundup of free tools as ways to track online leaks of information: "A lot of companies are stumbling across their own IP online by accident and well after it is too late. A best-case scenario for undoing the damage is that the data is quickly removed by the website and is never seen again."

A valid use, to be sure, but just one of many with less devious purposes. In all, ComputerWorld presents five tools, but I'm subtracting from the mix two from Google and one called Limewire, which requires a download (and if you don't disable "file sharing," you'll allow the program to share the entire contents of your My Documents folder). The following are purely Web-based, and I plugged in my name, along with a few other relevant keywords, to show you them in action. And by action, I mean these results came back to me in seconds.

Monitter.com: Combine the word Monitor with the social networking tool Twitter and you have Monitter.com. This simple-to-use website allows you to customize Twitter searches by keyword and location and save your searches as RSS feeds to have the data emailed or texted to you instantly.

Addictomatic.com: Provides a quick and easy way to search for your company or keywords across a wide selection of sites including news, blogs, YouTube, and even popular photosharing site flickr. Countless unapproved videos and photos by employees can quickly be discovered.

How do you track online conversations about you and your business?