What Social Media needs now is...

...PageRank for conversations.

This is the third post of a Social Media Trilogy. Having wondered when Social Media will have its “AdWords moment”, and hand-waving my way around a 3x3 of Social Media’s competitive positioning challenge, I might as well make something up about how Social Media can break through in terms of becoming the new high-scale, high-effectiveness weapon-of-choice for marketers.

All we need is a large-scale, real-time conversation detection, enablement, aggregation and amplification system.

Conversations are happening everywhere. And that’s the problem. They need to be detected, aggregated, amplified and syndicated back out. That will create a nexus of conversations which will be useful to end users looking to observe—and participate—and to marketers who now have a place where there is discernible user intent around finding conversations. The same “database of intentions” that Google represented for search in general.

The question becomes whether this is simply a next generation version of Techmeme, Technorati, del.icio.us and digg, or the mother of all Google mashups (e.g. 10x overweight comments and other “conversations” in results), or whether it is a system that perhaps has some genetic material from those, but is a distinct, new service with new technology.

Perhaps the PageRank for conversations.