Social Target's main man Nathan Gilliatt just released his Guide to Social Media Analysis and we are just as thrilled as anyone about being a part of it. This comprehensive guide includes information on over 30 companies in the social media space, and after months of interviews, research and compiling information from different vendors from around the globe, it is available for purchase.

While doing our interview and demo, I immediately got the sense that Nathan was the right man for the assignment - he just has a way of articulating the things we do in the social media space that I believe will make it simple and meaningful for anyone thinking of jumping in on paid services and springing on formal measurement.

We were also pretty excited about being a part of the Forrester's Brand Monitoring VPC. These sources are extremely valuable in the decision making process.

I happened to catch Scott Bauman blogging about a study released by ITtoolbox/PJA.

The ITtoolbox/PJA study identifies "user-generated content" (blogs, discussion groups, online communities, wikis, etc.) as having a more significant role in influencing a number of key areas of business decision-making.

The study reinforces a lot of our own firms findings on social media's impact on media consumption patterns, and the increased relevance of Web audiences, their online opinion and expertise and the challenges they are presenting to the enterprise and industry.

I thought I'd share a pie-chart breakdown of the different forms of social media our firm identifies and monitors. Some footnotes are that online news has become much more versatile (primarily to stay toe to toe with its online brethren the blog, forum and consumer site), allowing visitors to post their own comments and opinions. Forums incorporate chatroom type discussions (ie. message boards, groups, etc.). Social media content in social networks like MySpace and Facebook as well as multimedia (ie. Video, Images, Podcasts) may represent a small part of the current content mix, but are definitely the up and comers.