A recent article on “who owns the customer relationship” suggests that there are turf wars going on in a number of big companies over who is tracking, measuring and reacting to the conversations that customers are having on social networks about their brands. Marketers want the mantle, but execs in PR, R&D, consumer affairs all claim that they deserve equal rights. The cause of this strife is an interesting paradox: the admitted lack of programs in place to monitor this sort of activity (56% of the 400 companies surveyed said they don’t have any), the silo’d pockets of data that exist all over the organization and the lack of quantitative skills in the marketing department to collect and then analyze these disparate sources of data.

The good news is that discussions about the need to ratchet up the analytics capabilities around customer data are being had in the marketing department and there is a realization that existing methods of measurement are lacking. The bad news is that the end result seems to be turf battles instead of a concerted effort to work across “party lines” to fix the problem.

Part of the “fix” is determining what data is worth tracking and then devising strategies to capture it. Simply getting more data isn’t always the answer, but getting the right data always is. In this new world of social media, determining what to track (e.g. how many times someone mentions your brand) and how to interpret that data (e.g. is once a day bad or good?) is breaking new ground. Some interesting new startups are devising “engagement” indices that help to both track and measure the impact of consumer brand engagement on these networks in a way that provides useful comparative context and using those metrics to find new ways of monetizing that engagement.

At the end of the day though, word of mouth and the output of social networks, has always been pretty tough to track. Social media now provides the platform to both stimulate conversation and measure it. The double edge is that, just as it has always been, not all conversations are positive (just ask Johnson & Johnson who suspended its Motrin ad after hue and cry on social networks). In the “olden” days, those with a bad experience were probably pretty well contained. Today, dissatisfied customers not only record their opinions on line for the world, literally, to see, but push it out to their friends network.

Hey, at least the customers are talking in a place that the organization can access. And, you don’t need fancy schmancy metrics to simply read and then respond to the issues that customers surface. That should be everyone’s responsibility.