Many, including me, have talked about the value of listening to social media conversations.  I’m starting to think listening is too passive — and pays short shrift to what you can find when you really study your company or your industry’s social media ecosystem.

While immersing myself in some clients’ social media ecosystems last week I found eight  patterns with interesting business implications.

1. What makes people love your company — and hate it. Sounds basic, but “you suck/you’re amazing” make up a huge proportion of the conversations around most businesses.   Where to focus on your resources?  Leveraging the love and figuring out how to stop the hate are good places. (And not just in the social media environment.)

2. Help, I’m having a problem. A cousin to “you suck” are people who are having a problem with your products or company. They’re not haters yet, but they’re frustrated and screaming for help.  So many social media conversations are directly related to customer service. If you find this pattern, I’d suggest you get with customer service ASAP and create a plan for the customer service folks to directly monitor social media conversations — especially Tweets (Twitter) — and respond directly to people in pain.  In many ways social media is a natural extension of customer service.

3. Why campaigns and PR die fast: it’s also fascinating to find out why some campaigns gain traction and others die on the press release vine.  When you look at your ecosystem using a good analysis tool, you can see how ideas spread or never get off the ground. My conclusion after reading thousands of posts/tweets last week: most marketing and PR content hasn’t evolved for a social media world. There’s nothing to talk about. No reason you want to tweet it, blog about it, tag it, Digg it or Stumble it.  Those of you who know me know I’ve been like a broken record the last four years talking and writing about shift from messaging and bland content to provocative points of view that light up conversations.  But believe me, new approaches to content are really, really important today.

4. Twitter is the phenomenon: a huge majority of conversations about any company are happening on Twitter.  So for anyone who’s just getting into the social media mix, put aside those big blog plans and first focus on a Twitter strategy. For one client, approximately 85% of all relevant conversations were on Twitter. Yowza.

5. YouTube is a close second: Most of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies have a YouTube channel with great content.  Many small organizations are also doing amazing work in digitial storytelling. But beware schlock.  It can hurt your reputation and I found a lot of it.

6. Responding to people won’t cost a fortune: When you boil down the types of posts and tweets that would be valuable for a company to respond to, there usually aren’t all that many, unless you’re in some sort of crisis, of course.  For one company I reviewed approximately 5,000 conversations over a three week period and found that there were about 25 posts/tweets a week that it would make sense for them to respond to — and half of those should be handled by customer service. Before freaking out about what the costs of engagement might be, go exploring to see what’s really happening.

7.  Why are we invisible: what’s also interesting is finding no conversations around an issue or strategy that’s important to your company — or that you’ve been putting a lot of resources against.  Two things to ask: is there  an opportunity for your company to fill a void?  Why isn’t our strategy working?

8. Find direction from the data: Lastly, I found that mapping the social media ecoystem is invaluable in providing insights into an organization’s social media strategy. You see how much is happening — and where that’s relevant to your customers and business. You can target your audiences around different issues, and see how they feel about those issues.  You see all kinds of places where it might make sense to get involved. Based on the volume and relevancy of that volume, you can develop a business case and more accurately determine costs.

Especially helpful is that when you go armed with data and a rational business case, senior management is much more likely to pay attention.

PS — use a good visualization tool to help you find your way around your ecosystem. I like both TruCast and Radian6. They’re both good, providing different value for different types of organizations.