Yesterday I listened into Chris Brogan and Radian6’s Twebinar on listening to the social media conversation. One question I saw scroll by in the tweet-roll a number of times was the question of how to get your boss to care about social media measurement and about listening to the conversations. Lennon’s “I’m just a jealous guy” comes to mind.

Is your boss the kind of person who is incensed about attention or positive reviews fawned on your competition? Or, conversely, people misrepresenting your company or products? Well, you won’t know how that’s played out in the social media landscape unless you are tracking it — try showing the boss how a blog post or online news article has legs through reposts, comments, trackbacks, etc. And, the long tail effect of that post will never go away, and will come up in particular Google searches.

You can do a rudimentary job at listening using Summize, Google Blog Search and Technorati, and also BlogPulse. This might give you the low-cost insight your boss may need to understand the value of more extensive listening. These tools are only a basic beginning, because none of these tools give you a way to roll up the big picture information in a comprehensive way:

• How many posts per day, week, month occur about your competitor?
• How many are about your brand?
• What are the main topics of conversation around these conversations right now? How is that different than last week, last month, last year?
• Is your brand (and/or competitor brands) talked about in relation to current hot topics in the industry, or are there small pockets of disgruntled customers, or both?

Gaining a broad picture understanding is really important, because there are so many social computing applications that people are using — and social sites that people are using to connect to others of like mind — that there can be way to much noise to pay attention to. Plus, there’s just no way you can really engage with people across all these areas.

Listening first will help you streamline the process of formulating a good strategy for adding social media into the mix. It helps your company learn what’s important to those invested in the conversations already. Why is that important? Because in this still early and hype-driven fervor to jump both feet first into the social media fray, smart companies will tread carefully by taking smaller steps — the pains of failing big can be deep with criticism, bad press and bad faith from the communities that care.