As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us earlier this week, traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics tools help users get a good understanding of what a visitor is doing on your own site. This, however, doesn't tell you anything about the sites that influence your visitors and the actual value of these visitors for you business. After all, somebody who tends to visit auto blogs is far more likely to buy something from your auto parts site than somebody who doesn't show any interest in cars.

Sysomos wouldn't give us any details about how it tracks a user's behavior across the Internet. Bansal told us that the company doesn't use cookies and just places a small snippet of JavaScript code on the publisher's site. Thanks to the data Sysomos already has in its Heartbeat and MAP social media monitoring and analytics tools, the company can easily identify the ecosystem around a certain topic. How Sysomos can tell that one of your visitors also went your competitor's sites and read Autoblog earlier in the week remains Sysomos' secret, however.

For publishers and e-commerce sites, this also means that they can now keep a closer tap on their social media ROI. After tweaking Audience's scoring engine, marketers can now see exactly what the value of a given campaign on Twitter or the company's blog was. You can also see what blogs tend to bring the most valuable visitors to your site and then specifically target this audience.

We do have some lingering questions about how Sysomos can track a user's behavior across the Internet and the potential privacy implications of this, but there can't be any doubt that this will be a very popular tool among marketers, community managers and sales managers. Sysomos is currently testing Audience with a small group of beta testers and plans to open the service to all of its clients by the third quarter of 2010.

Telling your reluctant boss that social media is worth using because Dell made $3 million on Twitter, however, runs the risk of encouraging e-commerce broadcast as the model for engagement in conversation. Other, more conversational, examples of ROI make important additions to conversations about Dell and social media. (They also concern a lot more money.)

The @DellOutlet account has more than 600k followers on Twitter and frequently posts links to discounted computer hardware. Revenue from those links is great to be able to point to, but there is a risk of reinforcing traditional business thinking where it is not fully appropriate. New media is a new world and while the ultimate bottom line is important, many participants argue that the greatest benefits of engagement do not draw a straight line to the cash register. Building a strong community of customer advocates, listening to community concerns and discovering new business and product developement opportunities are softer benefits of social media engagement that skeptics often don't see when they presume that old-school methods of pushing calls to buy is what should be done on these new channels.

Hard and soft ROI are matters we focused on extensively in the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management, our first premium report for businesses.

Dell itself does a lot of listening and conversation from this same Twitter account. The public benefits of that conversation have been all but lost now that Twitter has changed its policies regarding the visibility of public @replies. Dell followers no longer see public replies sent to other followers they themselves aren't following. That's a major lost opportunity for public education and good will.

As Pandora community manager, Lucia Willow, told us in an interview for the Guide: "I intentionally respond to most customer service messages with private direct messages. If it's a question that a lot of people have, then I answer back publicly with an @ message."

Shhh...those public conversations are now invisible, for Pandora, for Dell and for all the rest of us. Though Dell reports good results from Twitter over the last two years, changed policies over the last two months may require a change in the way the company uses Twitter if it wants to keep seeing those kinds of results.

Four Better Examples of Social Media ROI

That Dell has made $3m from Twitter links is cool, and it's a good arrow to have in your social media advocacy quiver, but here are a number of examples we think better capture both the bottom line and some of the soft benefits of conversation. Joe Cothrel, Chief Community Officer at enterprise online community vendor Lithium, gathered these numbers in 2007 and we included them among other resources in the RWW Community Management Guide.

These examples reference older related forms of online social interaction, but they also concern far greater sums of money than $3m.

• A Cisco study in 2004 found that 43% of visits to online support forum are in lieu of opening up a support case through standard methods.
• Cost per interaction in customer support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
• Jupiter Research (now Forrester) reported in 2006 that customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail.
• Ebay found in 2006 that participants in online communities spend 54% more than non-community users.

Better customer experiences, far lower support costs and more buying activity in the long run. Those are observations that can help provide context to the high-profile example of Dell pushing e-commerce links out over Twitter. Dell is clearly doing a lot of the same kind of customer service via social media that the companies above cite, but watch out for falling into the trap of telling your reluctant boss that Twitter is important because Dell bagged $3 million there.

Thanks to Ben Parr for sharing the Dell Community announcement link.

"The 'last ad clicked' is an outdated and flawed approach because it essentially ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer's message," said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the advertiser and publisher solutions unit at Microsoft. "Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure -- whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels -- influenced an eventual purchase."

McAndrews was formerly the chief executive at aQuantive, an online advertising firm Microsoft acquired last year for $6 billion. Microsoft will unveil the new program today at the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference and it will be available in beta on March 1.

What It Means

This is all part of the continuing shake up in the online ad industry. New web technologies and advertising formats have forced the online ad industry to seek innovative new ways to measure web traffic and audience engagement. For example, last July, one of the web's leading audience measurement firms, Nielsen//NetRatings, announced that it was canning the page view in favor of a 'time spent on page' metric. Compete (a RWW sponsor) has a metric called 'engagement', which measures things like Daily Attention and Average Stay.

Microsoft's engagement mapping tool is a continuation of the evolution we're seeing in online audience measurement techniques. All of these changes have a profound effect on publishers, and generally have a positive effect for small publishers -- those who don't generate a lot of page views, but serve a specific niche and may deliver higher ROI. Better ROI measurement tools can help that type of publisher maximize their ad earnings.

On the flip side, they help advertisers better place ads to bring a higher return on investment. Rather than throwing page views at an advertising campaign, new measurement tools are helping publishers to better pick the best places and methods to advertise.

The Future

This type of engagement mapping tool will become really powerful when it can measure not only ad views that lead to a purchase, but also any other type of online or social interaction. This is probably the end game that Facebook is aiming at with Beacon. Imagine the value advertisers could derive from a tool that looks at how your online activity leads up to a purchase. I.e., did you see a friend talk about the product on a Facebook wall post? Did you read a blogged review? Did you see the product talked about in a YouTube video? Did you look at any ads when all that was happening?

There are already companies starting toward that goal right now -- Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Andiamo!, and Scout Labs come to mind -- but none of them thus far offer a really complete picture of how social interactions lead individuals to purchase (or not) a product or service. Once those puzzle pieces fit together, and consumer concerns over things like privacy are sorted, the online advertising industry will really start to mature. Rather than buying ads based on volume, advertisers will be able to very closely design and target ads to specific consumers -- which means we'll see very relevant advertising. That's all-at-once creepy and exciting.

What do you think? Is Microsoft's new engagement mapping tool a step in the right direction for ROI measurement? Do you agree with our guess at the future? Let us know in the comments.