Looks like the timing of Adobe Omniture’s new SocialAnalytics offering  previewed at the Omniture Summit, along with new offerings (to be announced next month) are very favorable omens  for Social Media Analytics as the consolidation of analytics providers and the channels they are monitoring are rapidly converging, as I predicted they would pretty much all along.

With Adobe Omniture (still getting used to putting “Adobe” in front of Omniture) going where, I suspect, all the other Web Analytics platforms will end up going – is total integration of Social Media mentions into the Web Analytics framework (which is site focused).

John Lovett of Web Analytics Demystified, who saw an early version of SociaAnalytics, which is slated to come out to the public this summer (which is when my book comes out – again, timing is good on these things and I’m not complaining) weighs in on what SocialAnalytics means to companies already running Adobe Omniture Site Catalyst.

Yet, the beauty of this solution is that users can trend and analyze social metrics against any metric within the SiteCatalyst interface. Further, the SocialAnalytics offering allows users to correlate data from social media with SiteCatalyst metrics and even offers a percentage of statistical confidence. This exceeds what I’ve seen in any other social analytics offering currently on the market. To illustrate with a hypothetical example, the Omniture SocialAnalytics capabilities will allow you to imbed traditional SiteCatalyst campaign ID codes into a your social media marketing on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, which could all be monitored for activity within the SiteCatalyst interface. You could then trend the social data from campaigns and mentions against any metrics that you currently use within SiteCatalyst such as visitors or conversions. Thus, you could monitor the impact of your social marketing as a driver for website traffic and determine what percentage of that traffic actually purchased online as a result of the social campaign. The tool does this by making a correlation (versus actually pinning causation), but the statistical confidence will deliver assurance as to the validity of the correlation. This is magical. It actually enables users to quantify ROI from social marketing activities with a degree of statistical confidence. No one else has this that I’m aware of today.

The Social Media ROI issues which I address in Chapter 1 of my book (I’ll also be speaking about it at the first Radian6 User Conference in Boston next month) will be largely solved by those prepared to solve it, meaning they’ve taken the steps to make ultraviolet data into usable data and correlate it with business and measurement metrics (when it can be correlated) – isn’t that what Adobe Omniture SocialAnalytics is doing?  I think so.

So who’s going to be left out? – All those that are not willing or able to put in the work effort and planning to bring all their social data in line with their other metrics – I’ll touch on that in the book, so by the time all is said and done, people who read the book will know what platforms they need, more or less what they need to spend, and who they should hire to do it, in order to turn all their ultraviolet data visible and usable.

And honestly, if your into Frameworks like McKinsey is – and big brands like Frameworks – you’ll need tools like SocialAnalytics and pumped up Social Media Listening platforms to do the heavy lifting that most of the current crop of platforms can’t do – which you’ll read about in my book which comes out on August 19th.

Also check SocialMediaAnalyticsBook.com for updates.