Image by luc legay via Flickr

Social, “realtime” tracking seems to be where it’s at nowadays. The technology is pretty difficult to pull of, but the best part is that it can be used for a lot of purposes. News discovery, buzz tracking, comment plugins are starting to develop. But one has to ask, WHAT ABOUT COMMUNITY?

News Discovery
This is where companies like TweetMeme or LazyFeed show off their stuff. There are a few variations on this theme - one is aggregating around popularity, the other is aggregating around certain keywords or topics. Useful stuff, especially when the realtime component really works.

Buzz Tracking
Some time ago, only mainstream institutionalized media was “worthy” of being tracked for mentions. Now it seems to be more about Twitter, Facebook, blogs and FriendFeed. Not all buzz tracking companies have woken up to this reality, but some have. What few of their customers actually understand is that in this social space, you need to get involved. If you’re not planning to get involved, why are you asking for “realtime” results? What are you going to do with them?

Comment Plugins
We’ve pioneered this social comment tracking paradigm together with DISQUS earlier this year. Soon, more companies followed suit, Backtype and JS-Kit being the most notable ones. Some focus on the blog commenting side, with social comments being just a useful add-on. Others have made social comments their focus and have even proclaimed the “death of comments”, in an interesting marketing spiel aimed at differentiating the company.

Crowd-sourced Whatever
The Hype Machine and similar services are using social mentions of bands or songs to figure out what’s popular, what people are listening to, etc. This approach is very interesting, as it actually uses the raw social data as an input to some intelligence and analytics.

Missing Pieces
Very few people ask “Why do we need this data? What does it help us do?”. So far it seems most people use such services either for ego purposes or to do crisis management, when really bad things happen. But is this all? Shouldn’t we be more proactive instead of just reacting?

Our view is more long term. Marketing right now is about doing remarkable things and then participating in the conversation with your tribe and giving great customer service.

In order to build a remarkable product or service, you need people’s feedback and support. They won’t give it unless you actually treat them as human beings, talk to them and build relationships. This takes time. Participating in conversations requires that you know where people talk and who’s talking. And giving great customer service is about listening, treating people as human beings and doing your best to help.

What all these have in common is the need to build relationships over time. Building a community is the best thing a business can do these days. But how do you build it? Are your efforts working or not? Who’s part of your community? Is that number growing? Are people participating and interacting with you constantly, or do they never mention you again after you talking to them?

This is what uberVU is all about. Tracking conversations and building community analytics on top, so you know who your tribe is and can interact with it and measure your progress.