by Sage Lewis WebWorkerDaily has a nice article on several very cool social media monitoring tools . If you aren't monitoring the social media space for your brand name and probably your own name, you are leaving yourself open for potential damage. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Approximately 5,000 marketers and search engine optimization professionals will be going to SES New York 2010 next week. In a challenging economy, it is even more important to keep up-to-date with industry trends, see new products and services, and maintain and build relationships. But what if you are stuck in South Succotash? Click to read the rest of this post.

Compete takes pricing to a different level but has some unique features as well. They have a few different pricing levels but to get all the features you need to dial it up at $499 per month. Although, some of their lower price points may provide good value depending on what you might use them for. Compete Site Profiles Here is how compete gets their data.

There are quite a few spy tools on the market currently, some more heavily promoted than others. They come in a variety of flavors such as SEO spy tools, PPC spy tools, and some which do both. Spy tools can be useful in an SEO and/or a PPC campaign. However, many of these tools essentially try to extrapolate scraped results which can lead to some fairly inaccurate results. Also,

SpyFu is one of the more feature rich tools, but probably has the least attractive interface out there. SpyFu offers SEO and PPC spy tool options along with their own keyword research tool. The SpyFu toolset covers US and UK markets. SpyFu's toolset includes: SpyFu Kombat SpyFu Classic Keyword Ad History Domain Ad History Keyword Smart Search A Variety of Top 100 Lists SpyFu Kombat With SpyFu Kombat you can look at overlapping and site specific keywords for up to 3 websites.

iSpionage is a newer player in the spy tool market. They are much more PPC oriented than organic SEO oriented. They offer 3 tool sets: Keyword and Domain Research Keyword Monitor PPC Campaign Builder Keyword and Domain Research They index the top ten results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing (although I only saw G and Y).

Keyword Spy offers 3 different accounts. Research Tracking Professional The countries available within a Keyword Spy account are: No other competitor really comes close to the breadth of their country offerings. Keyword Spy Research Account Keyword Spy's Research account gives you access to the following data PPC Ads (ad copy, the keyword, estimated search volume, estimated CPC, the position last seen of an ad and it's average position, total days seen/days checked.

Mashable reports that Twitter has announced an update of it's search API via the Twitter API announcements group on Google. Click to read the rest of this post.

by Mike Krumboltz If you came of age in the late '80s or early '90s, several stories may have really hit home this past week. Danica McKellar , who played the unattainable Winnie Cooper on the sitcom " The Wonder Years ," announced that she was pregnant. Blockbuster , the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of new releases and late fees, told investors that a bankruptcy may be on the horizon. The stock reacted accordingly.