The list of free measurement sites from MeasurementCamp II is on Delicious, using the tags "measurementcamp08" and "snapshot". The idea being that we collect a list of sites which can be used for free to create a snapshot of the activity levels of a piece of social media, to benchmark against.
Please add to the list in [http://del.icio.us/tag/measurementcamp08] and mention in the notes how the sites can be used and what for. If this list is hard to use, tell Ben Bland (moc.nodnolmmr|neb#moc.nodnolmmr|neb) - he has an online spreadsheet version which he could expand.
Before you begin measuring: 4 Key Questions to ask your social media measurement provider
http://server-uk.imrworldwide.com/pdcimages/NielsenOnline_May_Newsletter08.html
(The above is the top article in our newsletter focusing on social media. Scroll down too for a v interesting guest column on the state of Word of mouth marketing in the eyes of senior marketers. Further down on left hand side is a list of the most popular social media sites too.)
Search Engine rankings
[http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php] - Shows Google page ranking
Brand Overviews
[http://howsociable.com/] - A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
[http://addictomatic.com/] - A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
Buzz & Blog Tracking
[http://serph.com/]
[http://google.com/trends] - shows amount of searches and google news stories
[http://www.icerocket.com/] - Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
[http://www.boardtracker.com/] - tracks words in forums
[http://digg.com/] - Social Bookmarking, mainly for news, images and videos
[http://www.stumbleupon.com/] - Social bookmarking - general cool stuff
[http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/] - set up pipes for news alerts and overviews
Specific Social Network Tracking
[http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/] - search for word mentions within Facebook. Graphs too.
[http://adonomics.com/] - Application tracking and graphing
Twitter Specific Tracking
[http://summize.com] - search keywords on Twitter which "self-refreshes"
[http://www.twitstat.com/cloud.html] - Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets
[http://tweetscan.com/] - search for words on Twitter
[http://twitturly.com] - see what people are talking about on Twitter
[http://hashtags.org - Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags
Site stats
[http://www.compete.com/] - Competitor site traffic reports
[http://www.alexa.com/] - site traffic reports
Potentially useful free developer tools for augmenting measurement with the right data sets: https://www.analytictech.com/free_software.htm