Synthesizing Social Media

Making sense of online conversations is a tough, tough business. Yeah, there are tons of tools and tactics to streamline the process of discovery and tracking but *synthesizing* all this information and determining what's actionable vs. insightful vs. plain wasteful is a time-intensive task -- something that in time machine-based analytics will fix, but until then, unless you've got budget to burn on over-priced services, your best bet is human analysis. Which brings me back to the billing gap meme. Some firms think the task of synthesizing online chatter can and should be relegated to the lower ranks, if for nothing else but economic reasons. The theory being that time-intensive tasks like this should be billed at a lower hourly rate to maximize the client's budget, the challenge to this is that when you're engaged in conversation at the Del.icio.us | Yahoo! My Web | Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla