I had a great conversation with an organization recently about their future social media efforts.  They were considering whether it would be better for them to go out and participate in other communities outside of the walls of their site, or whether or would be better instead to try and pull people from those other communities in to engage on their own site.  The question is a good one, and the answer will depend on the organization, its resources and its goals.  There are various arguments for “pulling in” and also many for “going out.”  But there was one strong argument for going out that has begun to gain a lot of steam recently.

Social Media Monitoring and Measurement.

In other words, while it may have been true one or two years ago that measurement of how well an organization is engaging its community could only happen on its own site, this is quickly changing as tools like Radian6, Techirgy, socialmention* , Trendrr, (some paid, some free) begin to provide the ability for an organization to monitor the entire social web to see how much, where, and even how well they are engaging – and even how well their engagement levels seem to be stacking up against the competition.

A quick search for Wal-Mart on socialmention.com returns 840 mentions

As a result, the pendulum in the “going out vs. pulling in” debate may begin to swing toward going out for many organizations whose only reasons for pulling in the past have been the (important) ability to measure the effectiveness of their efforts.

We will be addressing other dimensions of this important question in the future.  Please leave your feedback in the comments section here, and stay tuned for more.