What happens when someone asks a question about your brand the social media space? Well, that’s a riddle that many brand, marketing and pr folks have been trying to answer for a few years now. If the question raised about your brand is by someone with a substantial amount of online clout, or has a large influence of social media sites like digg and buzzup.  The conversation about your brand can lead to bigger things than you probably wouldn’t expect. Measuring the impact of a social networking conversation has on your brand is not easy and there are only a few high powered, and expensive, search tools that can do with any sort of accuracy.

Blog conversations happen over hours and days and spider off via comments and trackbacks etc. You track some them by using Google alerts and then dispatch either legal, PR or the customer service department depending on the level or kind of attention that the situation requires. For the most part brand managers are able to keep a lid on most bad conversations or attempt to leverage the good ones going out there in the socialsphere, but it is a pretty unsophisticated affair.

Now let’s add Twitter to the mix. Twitter takes the conversations that are happening in the social networking world and accelerates them to a breakneck pace. Those very same conversations are now happening at real time by a powerful network of influential bloggers and social media connectors. They can propel the brand conversation into the stratosphere within minutes. I bet this scares the pants off of most traditional brand, marketing and PR folks. In the old days [oh say last year] you could find the social networking conversation that was happening about your brand, set up a meeting with internal and external personnel needed to either quell the negative impact on your brand or fan the flames of the positive ones. Then walk out of the meeting and execute the plan over the period of a week or two.

Well those days are going quickly! Today a conversation about your brand can go from zero to .5 million in less than two minutes and last a total of 6 hours then disappear as quickly as it arrived. That is pretty hard to get a handle on for most.

Here are a couple of examples:

Let’s take the story of Chris Brogan’s question the other week. Chris posed this question: “What’s the difference, to you, between BMW and Audi? Which do you feel more strongly about and why?” For those of you who don’t know who Chris Brogan is let me give you a little background. Chris is one of the top social media experts and has a huge following of loyal readers, fans and clients like Panasonic. His current RSS feed shows 17,315 subscribers, 5000 Facebook fans [5000 is the most tht FB will let you have on any one account] and 39,144 followers on twitter. Now I am sure that there is some overlap in the numbers but you get the idea. Not only is are the number of folowers that Chris great in numbers but they are also powerful in their own connections and followers. The ripple effect is huge here. So back to the case at hand. One question from someone like Chris and you can hear the collective inhale of people that are going to weigh in on the subject.

So for around 4 or five hours on twitter there were no less than 24 thousand conversations in 140 characters or less that where all discussing the pros and cons of BMW and Audi. I am sure that both of the respective car companies are aware that this event happened by now. I have a feeling that stats in this post made it into a few Powerpoint decks. So what does that mean to the brand and what can be done with this kind of data. Well there are a few things that if I was BMW or Audi that I would have looked in the data.

• Problems with your product.
• Problems with your competitors product.
• Likes and dislikes about your the product.
• Likes and dislikes about your competitors product.
• Possible flaws or manufacturing defects that may not be big enough to report but enough to tell someone about.
• Links that people post about your product.

These are just a few of the research strategies that I would have recommended if I had be consulting to either one of these brands during this battle of the brands. Now what to do with this kind of conversational blitzkrieg? If you are ready for such an event then like any attack good or bad you roll out your own pr/marketing plan and take advantage of the situation. The first line of defence would be the corporate website. The conversation is happening online and the Google searches are probably linking to your corporate home page right? Well if the comments are positive and are specific to a curtain make of model of your cars then make sure that the web team has a prominent link or CTA to that make or model that users can easily find. It could mean more sales if you act quickly enough. If there is a negative conversation happening then hold back for a bit and see where it is going. Can your loyalty and retention team “jump” into the conversation to address concerns? The could if they were ready and actively participating on sites like Twitter. There are actually a multitude of other methods that BMW or Audi could have done to take advantage if the situation had they been ready for it. Soon this type of brand blitz will not be a once in a lifetime event. I predict these brand spikes will happen on a weekly basis and that those who learn how to harness them will come out ahead.

Here is another recent example. When Steve Jobs announces the other week that he was stepping down temporarily from Apple due to health issues, the social networks erupted with the news. In fact I had found out about the news many times over on Twitter before I heard about it from traditional news outlets. It was 24 minutes before the NY Times finally broke the story. I know that there needs to be fact checking and such but I am sure that fact could have been checked and pushed live to the NY Times home page sooner than 24 minutes. The news of Steve Jobs went to almost have a million posts in a just a few seconds. Now what if the PR and Corp Com team had not been responsible for the news and it was actually was untrue. Not responding fast enough would mean your stocks are going to take an unnecessary hit.

So the question is are your brands duking it out in the hyper-paced world of microblogging? If so what are you doing about it. From my experience with working with large brands, I suspect not much. There’s probably not enough resources on the marketing team to handle it and the agency with the account is just not equipped the know what to do. This maybe a small concern for a lot of people today today but not for long. It is my strong recommendation that marcom teams around the globe start to focus on issue like this. Companies like JetBlue and Whole Foods understand the importance and have huge beach heads in this space already. What are you doing?

****UPDATE**** Here is an update on the metrics of the converation. Mike Troiano at the Scalable Intimacy blog has further anylized the impact of such conversations with a simple yet clear estimation of the impressions made:

24,000 conversations, folks. If on average the participants in those conversations had 100 followers (Chris alone has 40 thousand followers), that’s 2.4 million impressions. There’s no doubt in my mind these impressions are higher impact than passive, anonymous media equivalents… but you know what? Screw impressions. They’re the artifice of dying media. What’s the impact of a couple million affluent, college-educated, major metro-concentrated thought leaders being exposed to each other’s positive and negative views of a brand in a 24 hour period? I’d say pretty high. Maybe I’m just new fashioned.

As you can see from the above analyisis and comments below there are more than a few of us looking at this in 2009.