After taking the time to create, develop and promote your professional brand online, you might think the hard work is over. However, taking the time to track and evaluate your efforts will prove to be a worthwhile endeavor. Sure, you can check your analytics and your keywords, but there are some little, fun things that you can do to see what’s resonating with your customers and prospective clients.

delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on community, Delicious works to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

Within delicious, you can search for your company’s name or other specific attributes (e.g. CEO name or other prominent staff member) to see if a page of your site or other site featuring your company has been tagged by delicious members. If anything relevant to your company has been tagged, you can see what words members used. This can give you insight into how people categorize and tag your work. If they aren’t already used, you can add these keywords to your site’s metadata.

Digg

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. Searching for your brand, company name, tag line can let you see how many times readers have tagged and shared your story.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon lets users discover and share great websites. By using ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality, users can “stumble upon” web sites that probably wouldn't be found using a search engine. By searching for your company’s name or defining characteristics, you can get a sense of who is reviewing and recommending your site.

Keep the Conversation Alive

Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon are just three sites you can monitor on a regular basis to keep track of how your brand is being received and perceived. There are many other ways to keep an eye out for what’s being said. Sign up for Google News Alerts, track Twitter topics and gather data from Google Trends.

Don’t just stand idly by, though. Contribute to these news aggregators by adding, recommending and sharing your own and others’ sites. It’s a great community service and there’s no harm in planting the first seed to start your own forest.

Your brand identity is more about what people are saying than the keywords being used to search for you. Though analytics are important, having the conversation flow continuously is crucial to keeping your brand alive.