Google Announces Social Data Hubs in Google Analytics

So you’ve watched your social media tools expand and evolve, and you’ve wondered “when is my ability to analyze this traffic going to catch up?” Well today marks the next step in Google’s venture into social media measurement. Today Google announced the Social Data Hub, which I’m guessing this will include a bunch of the technologies they gained out of the purchases of Postrank and Socialgrapple. The primary role of this is to provide you with information on how social activities contribute to your goals and conversions, helping you aggregate social data and measure the impacts of your social media platforms.

So how the heck do you measure that kind of thing?

The Social Hub will be using the Activity Streams Specification, which defines an “interesting” social event as an actor, a verb, and an object. Or to write that in sensible english, an noun that verbs on a noun. Wait, is that more confusing?  How about an actor who acts on an object. Joe shares a photo, Jared likes pie, etc.

So does  how Joe likes Jared works in this case? Well, ‘author’ is an accepted object, as is a person (well, displayname, ID, etc. is). Yeah, you probably don’t need to think about this…

Personally, I can’t wait to see how it integrates with Multi-Channel Funnels.