Yep… The conversation has left the building and you might not be aware of it.

Do you know exactly what happens to conversations on the social web? How far they go or where they die? Are you aware of the real impact created by your latest blogpost? Once the conversation leaves the blog, we lose visibility of it, but that doesn’t mean it died.

Let me give you an example, we’ll pretend that you wrote and published an article on you blog and posted a link on Twitter. If you want to see if you had any retweets, you go to your @mentions page on Twitter and you see the actual tweets. Now, here is the question, what happens when somebody tweets about your content and doesn’t give you that @mention? Look at the following graphics:

The first graphic shows a tweet that includes 2 elements that make it easy to track. First, the mention of the Twitter handle of the author which will automatically display on the @mentions page. Second, it is using the same URL and that will let you track it, in this case it is an Ow.ly URL.

This is a different case, and you might be thinking right now that the author didn’t get credit, but this is awesome, a person is sharing your content. The reason it doesn’t look like the one on top is probably because that person arrived from a different source, it is clearly not a Retweet. Here is the question, how do you even know this ever happened if you are not mentioned and it is using a different URL?

So What Do You Do?

You need to track reactions related to that specific post. Sounds easy? It is. These reactions are happening on different social networks, somebody makes a comment on your blog, another person Diggs your story or submits it to Reddit. Wherever the conversation goes, you need to follow it.

Why? Think about this for a second, if you are creating content to attract more prospects and there is an existing conversation somewhere out there about what you said… aren’t those your prospects? shouldn’t you be involved?

How To Follow The Conversation Around You

As usual, I will mention some specific tools you can use, in order to find out who is talking about you.

UberVU

UberVU gathers all the activity related to one specific URL, it doesn’t matter if it was tweet, a digg, a stumble or a comment on your blog. This way, you’re collecting data even if you were not mentioned or the person didn’t use your tiny url…

The other feature I love is the alerts. You can setup email notifications to stay up-to-date on every reaction that happens on the social web. UberVU also generates charts for easier analysis.

Disqus

Is the commenting system that you see in this blog. Disqus actually displays all reactions right at the bottom of the post and it doesn’t generate any analytics for you, but what’s important about this platform is that it literally takes the conversation out of the blog. I have to clear that up because the last time I said that, someone asked me “what’s the point of taking the conversation out of the blog?” and the answer is that it is really not up to you. What Disqus does is give you the possibility to keep up with it.

Bit.ly

As you probably already know, Bit.ly is a URL shortener, but there are a couple of things you might not know. It recently passed TinyURL as the most popular URL shortener and more importantly for you and me, it can be used on Facebook and it tracks the number of shares you get by your friends. If you look at the following graphic, you’ll notice that it is tracking the number of clicks on the URL you create and the ones created by others under the same service, but it is also tracking the number of conversations in different platforms like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or Backtype.

Take a quick look…

There are ways to take a quick look and have an idea of what’s going on, mostly with Twitter. If you use websites like Topsy or Tweetmeme, you can see who has been tweeting about you or your content. You’ll be surprised of how different the results are. In this story shown on the graphic for example, which is my latest post “10 Reasons Why I Use HootSuite… And You Should Too“, Tweetmeme says it got 18 retweets while Topsy says it was 24, but the count is useless if you don’t do something valuable with all this.

Wrapping Up

Do you still wonder why focus groups and surveys are dead? Companies are listening to this stuff because it is the real deal, people talking about one specific topic without any restrictions. See it this way, that is your prospect out there, she is talking to somebody else about your service and doesn’t know you’re listening…

A final thought to wrap it up, how about you connect with these people, there is nothing more targeted than this.

What do you think?