TORONTO -- It was the biggest conference table Ryan Holmes had ever seen, and the eyes of everyone sitting around it were trained squarely on him.

The chief executive of Vancouver's Hootsuite Inc. had travelled to New York City in February for a special meeting with the brains behind about a dozen of Time Inc.'s magazine properties. Seated at the massive table were representatives from People magazine, InStyle and This Old House, all of them looking to Mr. Holmes and Hootsuite's technology to help them navigate the treacherous waters of the social web.

"All of them were using Hootsuite," Mr. Holmes said in an interview during a recent visit to Toronto. "It was really cool to see."

Marketers and public relations officials hear it all the time: You've got to manage your brand online and keep an eye on what people are saying about your company on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Of course, that's easier said than done.

Which is where Hootsuite's software comes in. Hootsuite is a browser-based dashboard designed to help its users track their presence on the social Web by monitoring responses and analytics on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace and WordPress blogs.

In essence, Hoosuite users can track who's talking about their company who's passing around links related to promotions and news and what services they're using to do so.

"That's kind of the Holy Grail of what Hootsuite does," Mr. Holmes said.

"Social media marketing didn't really exist as a job title prior to the last couple of years, but we're really building this as a tool for them and also traditional marketers that are looking for tools," he said.

In addition to the Time magazine chain, major retailers such as The Gap and Dell are also using Hootsuite to keep tabs on their online campaigns and marketing efforts. So are the social media team at the White House and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.

Not bad for a company that launched officially only five months ago.

Of course, the roots of Hootsuite go back a little further than that. In 2000, Mr. Holmes founded Invoke Media, a web services company that specialized in designing sites and building online applications for small and medium-sized businesses.

Two years ago, the company created a tool called Memelabs, an online software program companies could use to run video promotions online.

Companies such as Jim Beam, the Gap and Ben & Jerry's would use Memelabs to run contests where users could film videos and upload them to a site in an attempt to win a prize.

The idea was that the videos would, ideally, go viral, leading to lots of online exposure for the brands using the service without having to spend a lot of money on online advertising.

Eventually, the team developed Hootsuite as a means of tracking who was talking about and sharing the videos from Memelabs.

In January, Invoke created a separate company for Hootsuite and put Mr. Holmes in charge. So far, the company has raised US$1.9-million in financing from Hearst Interactive Media, Blumberg Capital and prominent angel investors Social Concepts, and Geoff Entress.

Currently Hootsuite is free for all users, but Mr. Holmes said the company plans to introduce special features for clients who want to pay for extra functionalities -- employing a "freemium" model --later this summer.

Of course, launching a business when venture financing is hard to find and capital markets are still getting over their hangover from the crash of 2008 may not seem like the best time to spin Hootsuite off from Invoke, but Mr. Holmes said he's been down this road before. "Anybody that has been around the space for as long as I have, you believe in fundamentally the Web is here to stay," he said. "I started at the bottom of the post bubble crash, so it was only uphill from there."

As well, with social media changing the role of traditional mainstream media in popular culture, there are a myriad of new business opportunities for technology companies that can help facilitate that transition and chart a new course for the future.

"We're at a really interesting time right now because a lot of the gears of old media are seizing up," he said.

"You saw last year there was a record number of newspaper and magazine closures. It's a scary thing. But the interesting upside is that properties like the Times and all these other media properties are looking at us as where they're going with what they're doing. They're investing very heavily into it, and wisely so, so they need to figure out what their new business model will be."