I continue to catch up on missed items from the past few weeks of conferences and iPad frenzy. During the week of our Marketplaces conference, a new SMB reputation management tool called Chatmeter was launched by former V-Enabler Collin Holmes.

The site will help SMBs manage and optimize all the places their listings and reviews are showing up online. This includes a free basic version and a $19.99 (per month) package that lets them also “spy” on competitors and get personalized recommendations on how to improve.

According to the release, the service also includes:

Review Tracker: Chatmeter aggregates and analyzes your reviews and provides benchmarking against your local competitors, notification of new reviews, and historical charts for measurement over time.

Social Media/Blog Tracker: Tracks your social media mentions, blogs and local media coverage in chart format to measure your online reputation and effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Listing Manager: Searches for your listings, highlights any inaccuracies found and creates awareness of other sites for listing opportunities.

Rank Tracker: Monitors your rankings across local search sites for your business listings and general web search for your website.

Competitive Benchmarking: Spy on local competitors, see how you compare, and learn from the leaders in your area.

Local SEO Analysis: Drive new business by helping to improve rankings on local and general web search sites through Local Search Engine Optimization (Local SEO).

Personalized Recommendations: Receive clear, easy to implement recommendations for improvement that are tailored for your business and local area.

The service joins the growing rep management field that’s currently occupied by AmIVisible, Marchex and a ReachLocal. It’s a field who’s time is right based on a media transparency, fragmentation and democratization of consumer voices on sites like Yelp.

The need to track and corral the growing mentions of an average SMB gets more important as these sites proliferate and as consumers get more accustomed to writing and trusting peer reviews. This is growing not only in scale but across various services areas (not just restaurants).

Another driving factor is increasing bid pressure for traditional search engine marketing that’s pushing many advertisers (and SEM providers) into alternate forms of online marketing like SEO and “presence management.” Expect to see more.