After doing your due diligence – research, listening – your company is participating in social media and using the most appropriate vehicle(s) for your audience whether that be on Facebook, twitter, YouTube, blogs, communities, or a combination. You have a bevy of content, and are updating it regularly and engaging with people along the way. These are excellent steps, and all will help with your online reputation management, but have you thought about taking it another step further and seeking out more conversations? I would bet your customers and prospects are posing questions right now that you could easily answer and would create even more goodwill towards your brand (perhaps your competitors are already answering them).

Finding these conversations can take some time, but here are my favorite search engines and tools that help me with identifying these topics. After you take a look around, you might be surprised with how much chatter is going on about your industry.

1. Social Mention allows users to easily search and track what people are saying about key topics of interest (your company, a new product, industry term, etc.). According to the site, Social Mention monitors over 100 social media properties directly, including – twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg and Google.

2. Bing Social Media Search is another tool that allows users to search relevant topics and keywords to get real-time results. You can sort by source (twitter, YouTube, Facebook) to make it easier to find something specific.

3. Netvibes is a fantastic tool that allows you to customize your own personal dashboard allowing you to track all the terms, keywords and topics you care about in a single interface. You can set up different tabs on your dashboard to make it easier to digest. It houses the feeds that you set up, and continuously searches for your relevant keywords on a host of sites, including online news sites, YouTube, twitter, flickr, blogs and forums.

4. BlogPulse is a blog search engine. This is a helpful tool for finding bloggers who frequently write about your industry.

What are some of the tools you’ve used that you find valuable?