What happens when a good online conversation gets started? It promptly breaks up into lots of conversations. What started in a blog comment thread is chatted about on Twitter, picked up on other blogs, and - who knows - maybe even discussed face to face at social or business occasions. People have been calling this “fragmentation” or “fracture” of conversations, both of which suggest that there’s a problem here. But that problem notion is also being questioned, thank goodness.

Mack Collier at MarketingProfs asks whether this fragmentation is a problem or an opportunity:

The thinking is that if people discover our blog posts on another site besides our blogs (such as Twitter, Friendfeed, or even via RSS), that they might not be as willing to comment. But is this reason for concern, or cause for celebration?

Shel Holtz calls the “problem” irrelevant:

There is also no question that the fragmentation makes it difficult to figure out where the conversation started. But that’s also the case offline, and always has been. It may not be fair that I don’t get credit for a conversation I kicked off because someone who read it took the story to a Facebook group instead of confining herself to my blog. But life’s not fair, and life never had the equivalent of a blog, where every conversation was contained in a single place, except maybe group therapy. The fragmentation of social media, then, is an evolution into something more like the real world, with which we must cope the same way we do in the real world.

Funny thing about people: they will talk about things that interest them where they want to, when they want, and in whatever way they want to. Some will read a blog post and Twitter about it. Some will leave a comment. Some will go write their own blog post on the subject, and maybe they’ll link back and maybe they won’t. And some will go to lunch with a friend and say, “Hey, I read something interesting today.”

You can’t measure it all, and you can’t monitor it all. Most importantly, you can’t force any of it back to your own site. (If you’re using social media with any kind of marketing or PR goals in mind, don’t you want the buzz to travel beyond your own web site?)

Holtz closes with a really important point about measurement:

In a comment on the meme, Daniel Riveong wondered if the concern over the broken conversation is targeting the forrest or the trees. Katie Delahaye Paine (author of the terrific new book, ”Measuring Public Relationships”) commented that Daniel rasied an important point. “The point for all measurement is to figure out what the program is doing for the business or the organizational mission (if its a non-profit),” she wrote. “Until people stop worrying about capturing every blog mention, and look instead at what impact it’s having on the business, we’re all wasting our time.” [emphasis mine - JW]

Precisely! But just being talked about isn’t really the point, unless you’re just in business for your ego. Knowing that you were mentioned on 157 blogs and 4,332 tweets is interesting. Knowing that after the conversation started, more people started coming to you with a business need is more interesting. The right measures will vary for different organizations, but they’re rarely going to be as simple as blog mentions.