Mid last month, Federated Media Publishing (FM) made a huge step in tracking conversations on the web. FM beta-launched their Conversational Marketing (CM) Toolbox to select FM clients including American Express, Best Buy, Dell, Intel and Symantec, but said they hoped to launch in Q109. The CM Toolbox enables marketers to track and analyze social media data points such as blog posts, commenting, sentiment, widget adoption, Twitter activity, social bookmarking and organic search ranking.

Analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, stated in the FM press release, “Consumers do more than view Web pages and click on ads. They engage with Web sites and marketing messages in ways that require a dramatic evolution in how companies measure success. I am happy to see others in the industry recognizing the need for a collaborative push to understand the valuable nuances of online visitor behavior.” Amen Avinash.

I am happy to see the industry take these sites seriously and for brand marketers to start adopting such stats as a way to measure success. Many brand marketers are only measure onsite activity, but with such a tool, they can easily measure offsite activity.

A one-stop-shop of social media stats is a huge improvement over how we currently track via Yahoo! Pipes. How are you tracking your social media hits? Have you included such stats alongside your analytics scorecard?