Consumer Generated Media (“CGM”) is the term that encompasses all social media content on the Internet authored by consumers. This content ranges from blogs, to social networks, consumer review sites, message boards, and videos.

Social networking and connecting with customers is all the buzz, for example yesterday Forrester Research did a webcast on “Know your Customers’ Social Technographics and Craft the Right Social Marketing Strategy” with Charlene Li from Forrester. She shared her insights on understanding ones target audience attitudes and behaviors towards social technologies in order to craft the right social marketing strategy. These are great calls for marketers to learn more about getting their arms around social media, listening to the voice of the customer and engagement with consumers in social media.

Jeremiah, a fellow web analytics association social media committee member, is a social media stategist and gives us outlines of how to approach positioning one’s company in the wider social media ecosystem. From a web analytics perspective, how does one even begin to gauge the influence of these conversations on one’s brand?

Social media technographics report by Forrester research. 

Some other stats, from Pew Internet and Jupiter research:

One blog is created every minute
27% (32M) read blogs
22% (27M) post reviews/ comments
44% (53m) are content creators(running own blogs/sites, posting messages).

There are more than 1.5 billion comments per day, the collective voice of the consumer to influence brands and buying strategy has never been stronger and will continue to be strong.

There have recently appeared in the market, applications, such as Visible Technologies TruCast that enable companies to monitor social media conversations, gain valuable insights, and even engage with consumers in order to better allow companies to manage their brands online on social media sites. For companies, these online conversations represent a new opportunity and challenge for brand monitoring, reputation management, word-of-mouth marketing, and consumer engagement.

This is pretty powerful stuff, the ability to segment one’s potential customers by feeling and tone and message from the enormous pool of social media sites.

I wonder how scalable this tool or any tool is, because eventually with the increase of the blogosphere appearing to be exponential how much data will their databases be able to handle?
But assuming all social media data on the Internet, posts and comments are collected in a database with multi-tiered querying – there would be some pretty powerful information.

Influence engagement metrics and advanced analytics:
Identifies the most influential consumers for a particular topic or issue
Determines the sub-topics of conversations
Interactive dashboard allows clients to determine specific sites and authors wielding the most influence in conversations.

What are they talking about (sentiment) scores:
For example, their intelligent sentiment technology evaluates the positive and negative sentiment and tone of conversations. Users establish sentiment criteria by scoring a sample of data, and TruCast automatically scores the rest. I’d like to put this to the test.

There are others such as Pythia which give trended social media data for free, so even for SMEs there are tools which can help.

I personally think the idea of engagement metrics within the context of the broader social media ecosystem and putting it to use to be able to positively impact on managing one’s company’s brand, social media reputation management, is something that we will all be doing in the not too distant future.

Any thoughts or questions or disagreements, please let the web analytics princess know.