I have a whiteboard in my office where I keep track of our client to-do’s as well as upcoming meetings and engagements. Out of eight items on the list right now, seven are related to the buzz-worthy topic of social media. As you well know, plenty of content exists today on the subject — books, articles, tweets, YouTube videos, Wikipedia entries, you name it.

Because of this trend, many of our clients are eager to know more: “What is it? Where do I start? How do I apply these principles in our markets? What kind of results can I expect?”

But before we map out a social media plan as part of a larger marketing communications effort, our strategic counsel holds that the first step in any social media engagement should always be listening.

Why listen?

• To identify who’s talking about our companies, brands, products and services
• To discover what they’re saying
• To learn how influential they are
• To see how fast the word is spreading (or if it’s spreading)
• To add value to competitive research
• To better inform our communications plans moving forward

To be sure you’re going about this the right way, there are a plethora of free tools that can help you identify a broad range of conversation levels — TweetScan, BackType, BoardReader, BlogPulse, Google Insights, Technorati, and Google Trends to name a few. But each of these utilities, for the most part, only focuses on one social media channel (e.g., blogs or micro-blogs), isn’t capable of surveying the entire social media ecosystem, nor are they capable of sharing data between disparate systems.

This is why we chose to examine the landscape of vendors who have entered the marketplace with commercial tools that are capable of comprehensively surveying all social media channels. Vendors in this space include Radian6, BuzzLogic, SocialRadar, Biz360, Synthesio and Techrigy (now an Alterian company).

After some due diligence, we chose Techrigy’s product, called SM2, to provide social media monitoring services. SM2’s monitoring application provides us with real-time alerting and content analysis capabilities, from social sources including:

• Blogs
• Wikis (such as Wikipedia)
• Message boards/forums
• Video/photo sharing Web sites (such as Flickr and YouTube)
• Mainstream media blogs (such as the New York Times blogs)
• Microblogs (such as Twitter, Friendfeed, and Plurk)
• Social networks (such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Ning)

SM2’s utility comes from its underlying social media warehouse, which currently houses over 2 billion conversation records from multiple sources along with approximately 35 types of metadata associated with each conversation. The ability to aggregate conversation data and then extend it with proprietary metadata is what makes it a powerful tool.

SM2 provides analysis of trend development, conversation volume, brand sentiment, social channel and location, author demographics and location, discussion clustering, and much more — throughout the entire social media ecosystem.

Within days of subscribing to Techrigy’s service late last year, we were collecting meaningful data on behalf of a client who requested insights into the public’s sentiment towards a particular brand. The data gathered allowed us to provide actionable counsel to our client for their 2009 marketing communications plans.

Now, seven months later, we are actively engaged in a number of listening programs, and demonstrating the value of such to more clients every day. Information is power and there’s a lot of information available through social media. Adding monitoring to your communication plans is the first step toward developing a comprehensive social media strategy.