By Jim “GonZo” McAnally

YNOT EUROPE – The value of a good brand is impossible to quantify. Although in many ways the immediacy of the internet can help an individual or company create a brand in very little time, maintaining the integrity of that brand in a world where reputations can be killed just as quickly can be a challenge.

Here are five monitoring tools that can help you stay abreast about what people are saying about you, your company and your competitors:

Addict-o-matic: Enter your name or any other term in the search box, and the site will return a page full of boxes containing results from places like Bing, Google Blog Search, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, Bloglinks and more. Addict-o-matic allows users to customize their results by adding, deleting or rearranging the results boxes.

SocialMention: Social media search and analysis platform SocialMention aggregates and streams user-generated content, allowing users to track and measure what people are saying in real time. The site aggregates information from more than 100 social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg and Google. If you’re really compulsive, you can set alerts for keywords and have SocialMention deliver the results to your inbox daily.

Technorati: A search engine for blogs, Technorati offers two options: Search mentions of someone’s name in blogs or search blogs belonging to a specific person. Other good blog search sites include BlogPulse and BackType.

TweetBeep: TweetBeep, a sort of Google Alerts for Twitter, emails you when another user tweets your name, company or product. Particularly useful is the site’s ability to track site mentions even when the tweet disguises the URL through a shortening service like Ow.ly or Bit.ly.

Yasni: People search engine Yasni provides an overview of a target’s associated networks, including contacts, pictures and other publicly available information. Yasni aggregates mentions from sites including LinkedIn, Google, Amazon and Technorati.

Jim “GonZo” McAnally is marketing consultant and a veteran of the adult online industry. For more about him, visit GonZoConsulting.com.