Earlier this year, at a TIEcon panel on the business of social media, I spoke about social media as an analytics machine.  Millions upon millions of people announcing what they had done, what they are doing, what they plan to do.  The Social Web is an observation tower for human behavior.

The highest tower among many is Twitter, yet when I asked Twitter’s VP of Business Operations Santosh Jayaram how many developers were working on analytics he mumbled, “We have a couple of guys looking at it.”  No doubt, Twitter has its hands full just keeping the lights on, but folks – analytics is the value of Twitter.

I’ve beaten this drum in dozens of conversations throughout the summer yet the focus always comes back to things like social graphs and crowd marketing.

Then, today, a guy with a bigger drum made a bang at Defrag. Eric Marcoullier, CEO of Gnip, Inc., has a booming voice and a big personality, and his brief talk this morning — ‘The business world doesn’t give a shit about your lifestream app” — resonated throughout the room.  Fundamentally, Eric argued, social media (for business) needs to “make the leap from marketing to business intelligence.”

Exactly.

Business is beginning to pay a lot more attention to Twitter and other social media as a megaphone and a listening post, and that’s a start.  We now have ample examples of small businesses announcing that the donuts are fresh from the oven and large companies responding to disgruntled customers to convince businesses of any size that there is something to this social media thing.

Typically and perhaps understandably, these now-enlightened companies gravitate toward selling and marketing.  Yet they are missing the big opportunity of social media by not taking the further step to understand the meaning behind the collective voice.

These organizations need a new set of tools and new approaches to data to gain that insight.  Fellow Defrag attendee  Nathan Gilliatt, whose practice is focused on working with corporate clients to bring them meaning to social data, described this as the need to break down the “measurement silos” to blend social media into business intelligence.

Indeed, social analytics brings a deeper understanding to customer engagement. It allows organizations to create the right product, drive the right relationships, structure a more responsive organization, and – yes – market and sell.

Most importantly, as Eric put it this morning, it allows business to “move beyond data and seek meaning.”