I’ve put some of my thoughts on the matter, and a review of the major Social Web Analytics vendors in The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, available at http://www.socialwebanalytics.com.

I agree that the use of conversation tools and social media needs to follow from a clear definition of goals and objectives.

I’m reminded of a distinction made by linguists between strategic action and communicative action. In a nutshell, the former occurs when a speaker seeks to influence the listener but doesnt seek mutual understanding. In the latter, reaching understanding (even if it’s not agreement) is important.

Put simply, most media are a form of strategic action insofar as they’re not in conversation with their audiences. Daily conversation and especially that among friends is communicative — it’s a means of maintaining a relationship.

This came to mind last wk at the New Comm forum. For ROI and related goals, metrics for reach, influence, etc would indicate campaign success; deeper topical analysis would then add content and context.

But if the goal is engagement and organizational transformation (openness) — which we heard a lot about last wk — then the model would shift from speaking to conversing, from strategic communication to relational conversation. Which is where recent case studies in use of social media for customer service have been cited of late.

Of course a mutual and reciprocal relationship between organiz/customer would look pretty overwhelming. I could see a path to engagement tho if tools could be used to identify the best points of entry and access to conversations. E.g. finding the person in a social graph with domain expertise, credibility (influence), and activity. Then engaging with that person — and standing back to allow his/her own words propagate in a natural and organic fashion. That could be tracked for effectiveness. But just tracked, not led or directed.

Social media marketing is going to head in this direction, with use of social gaming apps in which messages are turned into experiences. But I think at this point in time that users wont take direct marketing or PR through tools like twitter very favorably. That’s an un-researched impression, however!

cheers,
adrian

http://www.networkweaving.com/blog/2008/04/other-pentagon.html

Perhaps Google OpenSocial will be the first step in “reconnecting” broken social media conversations.

As an industry, we need think more about building applications which can power the business tasks that leverage social media, otherwise we’ll continue to get lost in hopeless rhetoric.

Todd Parsons
Co-Founder BuzzLogic

Social Media is now much broader than blogs, even as blogs continue to grow in importance. As I commented on Todd’s post, the conversation is very fragmented and it is getting more diverse as the number of mediums or “channels” increase.

It is a great question, “How do you track conversations that occurs between different social media websites?” It depends if you are asking this question as a participant in the conversation or from the perspective of a marketer/PR pro.

As a participant in the conversation, you will miss parts of the conversation unless you are active on all the mediums where it is taking place. This is a challenge since you might be looking at the conversation on a blog and perhaps you are following it on twitter, but you miss some of it on Friendfeed because you are not following the person there.

As a Marketer or PR/pro, it is important to take a broad multi-channel approach. Of course, Katie is right in her comment – what you measure must be tied to your business goals.

Most companies and PR agencies I talk to want to track more than blogs whether they are measuring the conversation around a campaign, identifying and engaging with influencers, or tracking issues or suggestions for customer service. They don’t want to miss any content, and they want to spend their time diving into the conversation instead of trolling, cutting/pasting, searching, collating, etc.

That is why it is important for monitoring tools to have a broad coverage of the conversation, from multiple sources, multiple media (text, image, video, etc.) and to track it as-it-happens. Thanks for linking to Radian6.