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They say what you say online is there forever. But how trackable is it?

The ultimate allure of online marketing is accountability. You cannot count how many people saw a billboard on the 280 freeway, but you can count how many saw a banner ad on CNN. And even, if that click became a sale.

But just as tracking clicks online have limitation, so does tracking conversations, influence and word of mouth. How do you track conversations that occurs between different social media websites?

From Todd Defren:

You write a blog post. You tweet about it. It gets posted to your FriendFeed profile. You share it via Facebook. You save it to del.icio.us.

...

Or, they comment directly via your FriendFeed profile. Or they comment on your Facebook post.

Social Media's Broken Conversations & Broken Tools

Such "broken conversations" can have potential implications for the social media monitoring, as Todd Defren smartly points out:

Social Media Monitoring vendors like Radian6, Buzzmetrics, etc. who may judge a bloggers' level of importance & engagement by evaluating the comment threads that follow each post. If those comment streams are happening in Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc., I doubt it's being captured and evaluated by the measurement gurus - thus undervaluing many bloggers' influence (and certainly discounting their level of "engagement").

So, is it time to panic? Not quite.

Limitations for Online Analytics: From Visitors to Marketing Influence

Let's go back to "clicking on banners and tracking to a sale" point earlier. While it is definitely trackable compared to a billboard in a highway, it is not absolutely trackable. That is - things happen: cookie blockers, problems with defining a "user" or a "visitor", and more. WebTrends, Omniture, and Google Analytics will all track the same events differently, sometimes differing by as much as 20%.

Some let's look at the limitations:

• Social Monitoring Tools are Limited

   

  From BuzzLogic to Cymphony: All of these vendors need to improve, but they will all have their limitations. Brand managers, marketers and PR people must be very aware of the limitations. These tools all all literally crawl millions of pages of the web, but there are billions upon billions of total conversations going on in the web.

• How common are Cross-Media Conversations?

   

  Todd's example of cross-media conversations (people responding to a blog via twitter, someone responding to a forum posting on a blog) are probably (at least for now) in the minority of conversations in the web.

• Are we aiming for the "Forrest" or for the "Trees"

   

  Even if these individual conversations are not being tracked. How much of the picture is missing? Yes a conversation will be missed here and there, but if a blogger really is influential - wouldnt we expect some (if not most) of conversations still happening via comments, trackbacks and links back to the post?

• Customer Service Issue

   

  But if customer service is the chief objective, should we worry about the missed conversations? Isn't this that what a community manager is for (to add to what social monitoring tools cannot do)? Or is this asking too much? Can we reasonably have good customer service, if we can only follow 80% of the conversation? How about 65%?

Todd Defren has definitely asked a particularly interesting question and indeed that's gonna be a question I'll ask the social media monitoring guys over at ad:tech San Francisco next week.

Source: Emergence-media.com