You’re out there in social media and you’re monitoring your impact – but how do you respond to negative posts or comments your monitoring may uncover? Believe it or not, the Air Force has a clear and concise guideline for blog assessment and response that you can implement.

This strategy is useful across all social media platforms, not just blogs. The Air Force themselves have put this stratagem into play on their blog, twitter account, Youtube page and Widgets and Podcasts.

Want to learn more about how Capt. Faggard and the Emerging Technology Division of the Air Force Public Affairs Agency are using social media? Read this terrific post by Web Ink Now: The US Air Force Armed with Social Media.

It seems like there is a new tool announced daily to monitor your brand or social media mentions. They run the gamut from free to thousands of dollars a month. How can we keep track of it all? Ken Burbary has a great list he’s collecting in a wiki. I encourage you to bookmark his Master List of Social Media Monitoring Tools.

Looking at the free tools my favorite application that monitors all streams of social content is Social Mention, which is like Google Alerts, but for social media.

Of those that are platform specific, in this case Twitter – my current favorite is Twazzup. I was monitoring the #apple #ipad announcement in real time today on this tool and the coverage was quick and comprehensive.

What tools do you find most useful?