I have a copy of Katie Paine's excellent book Measuring Public Relationships by my desk. It has helped me bridge the gap in my own mind between planning a campaign and measuring the results, especially results from social media. The government programs, non-profits, and a few of the business clients I have worked with have not had the resources to collect the data. For instance, none of these groups has contracted to obtain analytics or other data from groups like Radian6 or Vocus.

This has left me using Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and a few others bootstrapped together to attempt to monitor conversations and engage audiences. But what I've really wanted was a solution I could control and mine for data.

ThinkUp is that solution. Created by Gina Trapani, ThinkUp is a conversation analysis tool. It allows you to analyze where conversations are taking place, conduct polls and engage with influencers. Thinkup keeps track of blog posts, tweets, replies, retweets, friends, followers and links on social networks. The new version supports Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Combining the advice offered by Ms. Paine, ThinkUp helps pull in a lot of information that was lacking from my other tools of choice. For instance, I now can search the database and find trends, which means I can benchmark and do a better job of testing messages.

From the ThinkUp Website:

Using ThinkUp, you can:

Analyze: Get insightful graphs and charts in a single simple dashboard which helps you make sense of your social network activity.

Search: Ever get frustrated that Twitter doesn’t let you find a tweet you posted a year ago? ThinkUp archives all your tweets from the time you start running it, plus all its replies and retweets, and makes them available to search and export.

Visualize: ThinkUp’s rich visualizations let you see your conversations mapped across the globe, or as a collection of most-frequently mentioned keywords.

Publish: ThinkUp lets you publish and embed conversations on a blog or website. Everyone can benefit from the wisdom of your social network.

Export: Export your tweets at any time and open them as a spreadsheet in Excel for further analysis. Or just save them for recordkeeping.

So far the program, which must be hosted on your server, has performed well and has delivered on all of its promises. We all understand the necessity to measure and listen to constituents. ThinkUp is another tool to help us deliver and put that practice to work.