Originally Posted on Rallyverse (blog.rallyverse.com)

Susan Etlinger from the Altimeter Group has just posted a link to a new research report on the state of social media analytics, “A Framework For Social Media Analytics.” We’ve read it and would recommend it to anyone who’s interested in a deeper look at the current state of social media analytics tools.

While we expect to be discussing aspects of the report over the next few days, there was a passage in Susan’s introductory blog post that really stood out for me:

Listening and analytics tools have begun to converge, while engagement and content management tools (social media management systems, about which Jeremiah Owyang has written) remain largely separate. It’s a symptom of the immaturity of this market that the tools we need to listen and measure are separate from the tools we need to publish and engage, but there you are. Social analytics is still largely aspirational.

As we think about the current state of social media marketing, we see tons of great tools in both of the areas that Susan identifies above. There are highly sophisticated listening tools that use structured queries and natural language processing to extract a scaled view of user sentiment from the social web. There are enterprise-class social CRM and engagement platforms that help social media practitioners to manage multiple accounts and environments at scale. But which tools help marketers, agencies and brands to connect the dots between the two sets of tools?

That is, the challenge that we see for marketers is connecting the signal they gather from social media to the right actions — and doing it at the speed and scale of the real-time web. How do you consume social data and know what it means for your outbound social marketing efforts? For your on-site optimization? For your editorial strategy?

These are just a few of the challenges we’re trying to address at Tout. Stay tuned.