Saw the news yesterday, announced at LeWeb 11 that Google is going full blown into Social Analytics, and will be ready with their full offering next year; I actually predicted this would happen over two years ago, along with a shakeout of the social monitoring platform industry, when I spoke at #msm09 in London (see slide 15).  Philip Mui from Google spells it out, can it be any clearer?

“….So today we’re inviting social networks and platforms to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics. Through these integrations, marketers and publishers will be able to discover off-site engagement, optimize their engagement within each social community, and measure the impact of each social channel and its associated digital investment. ”

“…We’ll have more to share next year, so keep reading the blog or follow us on twitter@googleanalytics for updates. If you’re a social network or platform interested to learn about integrating with Google Analytics you can visit our developer site where you’ll find more information.

Phil Mui, Group Product Manager & Ilya Grigorik, Engineering Manager, Google Analytics”

In another place, tied to Google Analytics, the Social Data Hub is described in terms that are non threatening to the existing vendors, but it’s not hard to see how you can grow a collection platform from the pieces, which are or will be all in place to do so:

To integrate your social network with Analytics, you need to meet the following criteria:

• You operate a Social Network/Platform
• You own the social data and/or are legally able to share it with Google.

Note: The social data hub is not intended as a collection method for individual website owners to track social activity on their web properties. Please see Social Plug-in Analytics if that is your objective.

I foresaw (my slide-deck is concrete proof)  this shakeout taking place well before Google put their hat in the ring, and many of the vendors in this space (named as well as unnamed) have been acquired or are in the process of being acquired over the next year or so.

One unnamed vendor that just got acquired a month or so back was Glide Technologies (which I only found out about last week).   There are a lot of companies like Glide, that have interesting technologies and work flow, that fill a unmet need, but the public is generally unaware of.  With Radian6′s acquisition by Salesforce earlier this year, buying up these companies became a lot more desirable (even though it was never clear what any of those platforms were really worth), though the underlying problems with the disparate technologies, data sources and workflow remained unresolved.  I expect Google’s entrance into the space to entirely  change that within the next year or two, altering the landscape, benefiting some, and hurting others.

I first read about the news in WAD’s blog post last night via John Lovett, which underscores one of the main points of my own book:

“.. Currently, most marketers are forced to evaluate their social media activities through the lens that the platform (or their social monitoring tool) offers. Typically this yields low-hanging counting metrics which can be of some value, but more often than not end up as isolated bits of information that don’t provide business value.”

“…Getting at this all important business value in many cases requires wrangling the metrics into another system, processing data and just generally working hard to gain some incremental insight. This is laborious work for the average marketer, so it’s no wonder that eConsultancy just reported that 41% of marketers surveyed had no idea what their return on investment was for social mediaspending in 2011. Yikes!”

“… I see this new Hub as a potentially great equalizer for understanding the impact of social media as it relates to referrals for on-site activities which can ultimately lead to conversions and bottom line impact.”

In other words, the platform vendors did little if anything to tie the output of their platforms with anything specific or practical enough (probably, because they couldn’t yet do so) to be meaningful.  While Facebook may drag their feet implementing and interfacing with Social Data Hub, Twitter already has been using Google Analytics to track every important action, and it’s not a stretch to see Twitter adopting the Social Hub, and eventually, Facebook will have to, as well, because advertisers and publishers will demand it.

Which, as Lovett says, is good for all of us.  Will it be good for the vendors? That all depends.

Other Journal Links

 Liz Strauss escapes Klout.

SAS Analytics getting some action with the IRS.

Paper Stickers acting as Geo-Sensors – interesting!

Near Field Communications – the coming wave?

Online and offline Buzz linked with TV shows?