A lot of B2B companies have a tough time rationalizing their involvement with social media. It’s an expense and a distraction, and the value of broadcasting to the universe is dubious when you only need to reach a few hundred key decision makers. Listening for that small set of voices amid the massive conversation of the social media universe is extremely difficult. But few companies can succeed if they quit when things become difficult, so the question becomes this: how do you discover what discussions are important to you, where your customers, supporters and detractors converge, and how you can quickly engage in those conversations?

Networked Insights’ founder and CEO Dan Neely suggests the answer lies in a third-party platform – and he would happily suggest his company’s – to do the listening for you. “There is a massive set of data out there, but you need to be able to tell the difference between what’s important vs. what’s noise,” he says. “How do you hear the conversations that make sense for your company to engage in?”

Networked Insights’ approach is embodied in its SocialSense Listening Platform. The solution pulls in up to 35,000 conversations a day, from 15,000 blogs and 22,000 other social media sources, then uses keywords to pull out significant conversations. The solution presents the conversations graphically on an axis based on sentiment and engagement. Filters can be applied to sift the data to find the important conversations – the only ones really worth investing time in, Neely says.

“Other solutions can tell you how many times something has happened, but not how valuable those things are,” says Neely. “We measure it in a way that allows you to see the influential conversations, and to see which are your elite customers” within those conversations.

One of the secrets to finding the right conversations is understanding what those conversations sound like. “You need to learn the language of your customers – and it does not always sound like the language your marketing department may use to describe your products or your market,” he says.

A tool like this is only as useful as what you do with it; Neely freely admits that the insights it provides need to be acted upon in an effective way to drive value out of the social media investment.  Once you know where the important conversations are, you should participate – but, at first, only as what Neely described as a “groupie.” “You need to get a feel for that conversation before you leap in,” he says. “Once you understand that, your contributions will gain value in that community. You’ll project authenticity by being more a part of the fiber of that conversation.”

Authenticity is a big deal, as anyone following the evolution of CRM 2.0 knows. Neely says that too many companies convince themselves that the key to representing themselves well in social media is to focus on content creation. He suggests that the secret is not to create content but to curate content – provide pointers to existing content and multiply the value of what you provide to the community. Even content created by competitors is worth passing on, he says – “the Progressive Insurance model,” in which you share data that might lead a potential customer to a competitor, is a long-term winner, because it builds trust and projects an image of your organization as a real partner in his success.

And, of course, it’s important to keep an eye on how your participation impacts the conversation’s intensity, the degree of engagement and other behaviors that measure your success. Social media can be unpredictable and unmanageable, but only if you allow yourself to ignore tools that help you predict and manage the impact of your participation.