Sean, good point, and I couldn’t agree more – monitoring and listening is useless, until you can take action, and figure out how that action maps to revenues and ROI. This is the year that monitoring grows up, and our ability to map SM to ROI is going to determine whether or not SM makes it as part of a marketing plan in organizations large and small. Listening is nice, but the C-suite wants to see ROI.

We at Biz360, and a lot of our industry, are focusing on just that – not just displaying who talks about you, where and when, but creating tools to help engage, track leads, and quantify results. We have a social CRM system now, and we are building it out further. This is the year social media “grows up”.

I agree that an apples to apples comparison would be great see. You very well maybe right on 80/20. I honestly don’t see how they could be perfectly aligned. Certainly Google and Yahoo/Bing aren’t. And we’d all be lucky if our site or campaign analytics were off by only that much. Thanks again and look forward to future articles.

First of all, I agree that there is too much emphasis on new tools that monitor social media and not enough emphasis on why. That diagram above makes me want to watch Battlestar Galactica but does not give me a hint about actions to take. There are so many companies that have popped up and want to sell you ways to look at social media. At the end of the day though, you need to connect it to sales growth. So thanks for pointing that out.

Second, I’m not quite sure I know what you mean when you say, “companies are often looking for the wrong things – they are looking for a person that usually does not exist…” From my experience I would have to agree with Mr. Kaushik in that having the right analyst is the most important investment. His point is that you need to spent serious time and resources on people first, then technology. Are you agreeing or disagreeing?

Thanks for the great info!

The point of the conference (and more importantly, of the report that will come out of it) is to begin the process of creating a framework for best practices in this space. This includes properly aligning measurement to business objectives.

Premature? Absolutely not. We’re a year late, actually. How are companies supposed to figure this out if we don’t help them along with mechanisms like this one?

With the vast majority of social media “experts” and consultants still incapable of articulating something as simple as R.O.I. to their eager clients, it’s time we started moving the ball forward.

I hope you’ll join us.