I’m just about to go to bed, but, after a long Thanksgiving day I wanted to get out a few thoughts today about something I noticed, and it may relate to Social Media, in a direct way.

Found it hard to post much to any of my blogs today, even thought I tried – my mind was “tired”, yet I did post - but mostly to Facebook.

What I found was that I had ideas that I shared with a friend or two, or responded to my Facebook News Feed, either to sign up for events I’ll go to next week or to comment back on posts to my wall, or as a comment to something I posted earlier.

And that got me thinking of what I was doing was giving back though interacting with my Social Media feeds as opposed to blogging, so to speak.

In fact, that’s one thing I notice about Robert Scoble, with all the posts he shares in Google Reader with me, sometimes, what he’s doing in that way, touches me a lot more than his actual blog posts – and his notes on the posts he is sharing is often more contextually relevant to me than his writings, which I tend not to read all that much.

In like manner, I found myself putting more energy into sharing stories in Google Reader and taking the time to post a note with the share (that gets picked up by Friendfeed and also goes into my Facebook Profile (feed)),  plus developing relationships with real and virtual friends that might not be immediately tangible yet, function as a precursor or co-enzyme, to action.

I could have as easily just written focused on posting to my blogs – but instead, I found my self interacting with my Facebook News feed - or emailing a friend, or perhaps I would twitter  something (I didn’t, today) – and much of that activity would appear to be invisible (even though it’s not) – maybe some of it shows up in my Friendfeed - but all the work I did – what I gave, is just as important as any blog post (what about an iPhone painting?) I might do.

Hey, I’m not looking for the wisdom of crowds…

So, I want to put forward two ways of looking at giving, along with if that co-relates to Engagement, or not.

Today, my “giving” or engagement with interacting with my Facebook News Feed, was externally driven -  today is Thanksgiving Holiday (or was the Thanksgiving Holiday – it’s actually early Friday morning as I write this), if I was at work, or if it was another day, maybe I’d not be interacting with my Social Media feeds as much; I don’t think the externally driven factor and be ignored – it has to be a factor.

The other thing I want to put forward is a way to evaluate involvement in Social Media – the simplest way, at this point, is to co-relate the following :

1. Time spent on Social Media Site (compared to all the time spent online) – note, that can be looked at individually (all the time I spent on Social Media vs. all the time I spent online, period) – or in mass, all the time the internet population spent on Social Media vs. what they spend on the rest of their online activities.

I’m even willing to forget the number of times Social Media sites are visited vs. all sites.  By the way, looks like MySpace is having a problem since February – people are spending substantially less time there.

2. The number conversations taking place (this could be measured by the instances of interacting with a feed, such as the Facebook News Feed, or Twitter (Feed) or Friendfeed.  You can probably add them all up – and compare them to the overall internet audience.

The problem is that most of the conversation activity won’t show up – it’s AJAX, every time I comment on my Facebook or Friendfeed – a new page is not generated – for now, I need a proxy for conversations and the best I can come up with is Page views per visit – but it’s a poor proxy – but better than none at all.

There is some interesting research on Facebook that says that some activities you do are more “engaging” by nature than others (see this video clip to get a sense of that)

Perhaps this can all be combined into one metric – but what this really gets back to is there are many activities that are precursors to Social Media, to Engagment, in fact, but that are not measured – you can say the act of “Engagement” makes the assumption what ever needed to preceed it, happened.

But I would think that you do need to measure what preceeds an event or action – hey, I can take an exam and ace it, but doesn’t it also count how much I studied for it?

Anyway, enough of this for tonight – I just wanted to close out today by giving Thanks to all my friends, to my family and give form to the idea that we need to look at the whole picture.