Have I mentioned Mention yet? It’s an exciting 12-month-old real time monitoring service that enables you to track brand mentions across the social web. The French start-up has 50,000 paying customers and recently closed a $800,000 funding round to take aim at the US market.

Mention enables you to monitor sources in 42 languages across the social web including blogs, Facebook, Google+, forums, Google News, Twitter and websites,

This is a crowded market. Brandwatch, Meltwater Buzz, Radian 6 (owned by Salesforce) and Sysomos, and plenty of others, are all fighting for a piece of the action.

What sets Mention aside from the pack is is its business model. It has a range of offers from a free single-user with 500 mentions per month service, through to $99.95, five-user, and 50,000 mentions per month service.

This freemium model is appealing to anyone from a sole public relations operator looking to monitor a single brand through to large corporates seeking to monitor multiple brands and requiring more sophisticated reporting features.

The monitoring app is available for Android, Apple iOS, Chrome plug-in and web.

Mention’s benefit is its simplicity. It is stripped back to core monitoring functions. Mentions of keywords are either sent via email alert or presented in realtime in a single feed with details of the source and a summary of the content. It uses adaptive technology to prioritise content and modifies results if you reject a result.

You can see how the results of a vanity query are presented in the screenshot above.

There are plenty of features that have been left out. It’s not possible to do retrospective searches, it doesn’t integrate with influencer systems such as Klout or Kred, and it won’t plug into other in-house or third-party systems.

At its most basic Mention is an alternative to Google Alerts. Its realtime service and reach across the social web, including Twitter, are excellent.

Mention can also be used as a more grown-up reputation management tool by plugging in Facebook or Twitter accounts so that you can react to messages in an integrated environment. But this pushes the tool to its limit because of the lack of audit, influencer or customer relationship management (CRM) functions.

If you fancy checking out Mention for yourself here’s a link for a free month trial of the Pro version.  It will take you less than five minutes to set up an account and start monitoring keywords.