The one day class I’m giving in London is filling up – and MyCustomer.com, where I have published before – is helping promote what is going to be the first time I’m doing something like this – a one day intensive – nothing held back – you get it all, what I know – what you can do with these platforms, and what you can’t yet do with them – and why the things you were trying to do, aren’t working – and why some of things you should be doing – you aren’t.

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We’ll discuss all of that – on Thursday – January 26th, in London.

Social media analytics guru Marshall Sponder is heading up a one-day workshop in London at the end of January, to drive education in social media monitoring.

Social media monitoring has emerged as one of the hottest topics in business, demonstrated by Salesforce.com’s headline-grabbing $300m deal for Radian6,

But use of the tools is still maturing and many feel they are yet to get the best from their monitoring efforts.

As such, Our Social Times is hosting a one-day workshop on January 26 in London, UK, with Marshall Sponder, Emeritus Director of Social Media at the Web Analytics Association and author of Social Media Analytics, featuring teaching, practical sessions, live surgeries and Q&A sessions.

Attendees will learn about issues including how to monitor your brand and its reputation on social media, how to choose the right monitoring tool for your firm, and how to extract meaning from social data.

Attendees will also receive a free copy of Marshall Sponder’s book, Social Media Analytics.

For more information visit the Social Media Monitoring Training website.

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.

Occurred to me recently that Google can be, under certain conditions, an excellent tool to categorize sites and media properties with, though I realize it will not work in every case.   I’ll talk alot more about this in my book on Social Media Analytics (a new book site is being worked on where I will talk about the book as I’m writing it and ask for feedback).

But here’s one example, if I were to take a list of sites – any list  – could be Comscore‘s 50,000 or so sites, or just any list all of blogs, message boards, photo sharing sites, main stream media outlets, whatever, and run a set of pre canned queries on them while counting the results, I could tell you how relevant they were on the subject of that query.   Sure, there would be some issues with dynamic urls and sites that are serving up a lot of duplicate content (which Google tries to suppress with the duplicate content filter) but over all, if I have a good set of queries and enough time, I could categorize a bunch of sites with relevancy for a particular subject (what the query is about).

If I had enough different queries, and enough time, I could categorize the web (but right now, without a bit of programming, this would be impossible to scale); in fact much of Comscore is manually deciding, via a dictionary team, what categories a site is in.   And Google collects information via Google Analytics Benchmarking where sites that share data can compare themselves to other sites who also share anonymous data in a category (say, magazines) and see how they preform on 6 preset metrics.

Much of this got stimulated by looking at CisionPoint and Recorded Future, two platforms I’m playing with right now and will have more to write about them in, lets say, the near future.  I’m also giving a webinar with Jay Krall of Cision in mid November on all the neat things CisionPoint can do and it will be an interactive webinar where I’ll be asking Jay some cool questions and he’ll show people what CisionPoint actually does.

For example, CisionPoint now reads in Radian6 data and merges it with their Media Outlet database and Industry Segmentation – I bet a lot of people didn’t know that or what to do with such information.

More about this shortly.

And then there’s Monitoring Social Media NYC 2010 taking place next Thursday and Friday – I’ll be speaking both days and hope to see some of my readers there.