Earlier last week, I caught Drew Myers blogging about the topic of social media measurement. I meant to expand on the interview with Jeremiah Owyang and Eric Peterson the day I happened across the post, but its been difficult to keep my blogging regular, and after Jeremiah added our company to his list of companies that measure social media, the least I could do is keep my word to him that I'd blog on a more regular basis. I'm still working on keeping my posts tighter.

The "value" part of my promise to Jeremiah brings us to the first in a series of topics I'm going to string together in this one post. It deals with the purpose of blogging, and how some bloggers use the medium as a form of conversational marketing. On the one hand, excessive flamboyance isn't necessary if your purpose is to get people talking, unless you're into the kind of chatter laced with words which might include "rich," "pompous" and/or "arrogant."

On the other, Jeremiah's point about being totally naked and his willingness to share his stats draws on the theme of blogging as a marketing vehicle which is used to influence and effect change. I believe this means being genuine, and taking the time to contribute. What I take away from Jeremiah's post is that he's a person who is passionate about what he does and his numbers reflect the kind of following that appreciates it. Its the kind of inspiring post which informs my own reasons for posting. And that includes listening to suggestions on how I can improve and make my own blogging a more engaging experience for my readers.

The other topic I wanted to cover relates back to Drew Myers post and the video interview - more specifically on the point of arriving at a working framework for measuring engagement. Some interesting observations that I'd like to add to the mix involve comment tracking, and how comment handling seems to have taken on a life of its own.

The other relates to practical measures of engagement - in my experience, this is the trickiest. While RepuTrace(TM) is able to score, track comments and measure blog influence through its tra.cktion platform (blogrolls, blog linking to help determine blogger influence), the other important parts of our monitoring scope include measuring the footprint of mirrored, rebroadcast and repeating instances of the same online discussion. While we know blogrolls are one example, we've seen examples which include posting email communication between two people unknown to one of the parties involved in the original communication, as well as newsletters, internal memos or announcements intended for a limited viewing audience, and rebroadcast online on a forum, consumer site or blog for public consumption.

Which leads me to the final point on determining the volatility of online discussion topics. Its becoming increasingly important that the business culture focus its attention in the area of internal risk awareness - specifically as it pertains to the potential for past problems to resurface. That includes an approach to measuring the potential for incidences of negative online attention to repeat and expose that business to a form of risk which might have been averted.

The Internet provides an opportunity for written words to linger, and this could be especially problematic if a disgruntled employee decides to connect a hot-topic issue with one which occurred in the past. What I'm suggesting here is a form of media measurement which can bridge commonalities in scored analytic data, with an ability to develop relational patterns to interpret the potential of recurring risk. An aspect which may provide significant advancement in this area might come from formal measurement vendors interpreting correlations using incident data from a number of organizations and professional sectors to determine risk probability scores and ratings.