Third Thursday's social media and PR meetup featured speakers from meme/brand measurement firms Nielsen Buzzmetrics (the makers of the beloved BlogPulse), Buzzlogic, OpinMind, and Biz360. In general, the theory is you can only manage (pronounced "control") what you can measure. So these companies spider the web blog and MySpace data and rent their human tea leaf readers to interpret that data.* [Correction: Only Buzzmetrics and Biz360 have humint; Buzzlogic and OpinMind are fully automated.] These folks want to tell you how your company, products, presidential candidate, or trademarks are showing up in "social media."

They can do this because of the "permalink." Permalinks freeze a moment of web conversation, binding it to an url. Skype doesn't have permalinks of conversations past. Skype only leaves that sort of record in desktop archives and Skype's login and billing records.

Until now.

Links to Skype public chats and Skype Me links are showing up on web pages. But these are only pointers to people or conversations; not records of the conversations themselves. 

Yet Skype talk is closer to a marketer's holy grail.

• Live conversation is less filtered, less calculated, and more trusting than "content" "created" for public consumption.
• Live talk reflects our social and professional networks more closely than our blogrolls and "friends" lists ever do.
• While blogged opinion about your brand is more discoverable and enduring, the opinions shared friend-to-friend in private have more immediate impact and affect the relationship.
• Most of all, live conversation is closer to "action" and "engagement" than nearly anything else you'll see cataloged and dissected by the marketing metrics crowd.

So they don't, they can't, track IM or Skype buzz.

Yet.

I'm waiting for an Alexa-style Plug-In for Skype, where people volunteer to share archives and call patterns. Anonymized, of course, and with other privacy concerns addressed.

So when marketers ask "what are people saying about us," researchers can tell them.

p.s. The metrics firms only look at English language social media. Memes build up in one culture only to leap fully formed into another. The lexicographic and semantic challenges of parsing other languages for and tracking the flow of ideas among them are as severe as the opportunity is rich.

p.p.s. buzzword of the night: James Kim of OpinMind tossing off "sentimeter;" a gauge that measures blogger sentiment on a topic. Skype scores 76% pro and 24% con.