Being creative and transparent is only half the story when it comes to social media marketing. In order to develop and execute a truly successful social media campaign, you simply must be able to monitor your results. At the end of the day, your boss (if you work as marketing director at a company for example) will probably be more impressed by cold hard numbers than how cool your Twitter or Facebook profile looks.

Here are five must have tools for any social media marketing arsenal -

The best tools for your social media monitoring toolbox

1. Social Listening - I'm a huge fan of two products that facilitate social media listening. They are Spiral16 and Radian6. While both tools have their strengths and weaknesses, you really can't go wrong with either of them.

Caption: Spiral16 Spark Visualization of Connected Conversations

Spiral16 is a tremendous tool for visualizing conversations that are occuring out on the web and on social networks in particular. Whether it is a blog, message board post, picture or even a video, Spiral will help uncover those conversations and rank them by influence and sentiment.

Radian6 is another great tool we use for social listening. If you need to get a listening campaign up quickly Radian6 is a great choice. You can run a time limited campaign for free to get a lay of the land.

2. URL shorteners - With the meteoric rise in Twitter's popularity, URL shortening services have started to come into their own. A particular favorite is tr.im. Not only will you get the shortest URLS's possible for use on Twitter, you'll also get a fairly robust analytical system to track the number of clicks on your links.

Mac users: there is a very cool dashboard widget which keeps track of your short urls automatically. Of course, there are also other services available as well - budurl.com and bit.ly specifically.

3. Twitter search - Twitter search is still one of the most effective ways to take a pulse of the social media community. This real time conversational search engine (found here at search.twitter.com) gives you the ability to scan Twitter for conversations happening around specific keywords. Whats more, you can limit your searches by certain geographic areas, users or even basic sentiment.

4. Facebook Insights - Facebook has placed a lot of emphasis on analytics in their Facebook Business Marketing program, allowing page owners to access information on the age, sex and demographical breakdown of their fans. Couple this with their post quality scoring system and you will know if the content you place on your page is working.

5. Google Analytics - Yep, its good for more than just monitoring your search engine optimization (SEO) or pay per click campaign results. Google Analytics is easy to set up, but best of all, free. Get in the habit of monitoring your referring sites to see which social networks provide the most traffic. If you run an e-commerce site, you should be able to marry those referrals to actual sales.