Wendy Troupe and I were speaking to Nathan Gilliatt this morning about the nature of analysis, measurement and social media.  The conversation ranged across a variety of topics: from his recent and very successful AnalyticsCamp in Chapel Hill to the occurrence measurement silos (we all agreed, by the way, that measurement silos stink and rob you of true cross-channel, big-picture insight).  During that conversation, Nathan said something that stopped the coffee cup halfway to my lips.  It was eloquent, simple and yet, profound:

"[If you set aside the corporate desire for engagement], Social Media becomes a set of really powerful, publicly-available, data points."  (paraphrasing, Nathan said it much better)

You can't measure what you can't see.  If your tools are limited to measuring volume of mention, share of conversation, +/- sentiment, degree of influence, etc there may be a lot you're not seeing.  In fact, if your current analytics tools aren't measuring the effect that your social media initiatives have on other communications channels, then you may be attempting marketing optimization while blindfolded.

2010 seems to be the year that everyone thinks corporations will advance beyond the often awkward and tumultuous stages of "Social Media Puberty" to the more focused stages of Social Media Maturity.  Twitter is rife with tweets on the subject.  Google's delivering 700,000 pages on the search term.  Social Media Blogging luminaries like Brian Solis, Marshall Sponder and MarketingProfs' Paul Williams are cogitating and writing about it.  In fact, MarketingSherpa recently made the 2010 Social Media Benchmark Report available, which detailed, among other things, the three phases of Social Media Maturity. 

We felt that MarketingSherpa didn't go quite far enough.  In our recent post titled, ROI Measurement: The Fourth Phase of Social Media Maturity, we added a new Phase of development.  This new Phase captured a company's evolution beyond the often siloed and isolated, strategic Listening Phase to a phase of social media maturity characterized by quantifying and correlating the performance and activity in one communications channel to the performance and activity of other/all channels. This phase not only makes social media ROI calculation possible but also makes things like advanced trend analysis, multi-spectrum sentiment analysis, and predictive modeling possible.

The chart below features our interpretation and embellishment Marketing Sherpa's three phases:

MarketingSherpa recently published an executive summary for a new study called 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report. If the executive summary is any indication, I think the report may hold some very interesting findings about the corporate adoption of social media as a increasingly-common customer outreach channel.  If you haven't read the executive summary yet, I strongly encourage it.

While I won't provide a summary of the summary, I would like to share some thoughts on their findings.  They've created a very interesting info-graphic below to describe both the recommended approach to social media and the various stages of, what the report calls, Social Marketing Maturity.