Federated Media's Conversation Measurement Toolbox is now live in beta.First announced in June, the toolbox enables marketers to track and analyze their conversational media campaigns.

57% of "conversational marketing" early adopters claim social media tools are becoming more valuable, according to a Society for New Communications report (via MarketingCharts). Among respondents, 27% said social media is a core element of their communications strategy.

But they struggle to find appropriate metrics with which to measure their efforts. Awareness and engagement — the byproducts of conversational marketing — are harder to trace than search engine ranking and website traffic, for example.

Federated Media's CM Toolbox uses an open, scalable architecture that collects, aggregates and reports data from internal reporting, third-party tracking providers, and social media application developers. Existing data partners include AideRSS, BuzzLogic, comScore, DoubleClick, Google Analytics, Meebo, Nuconomy, Pheedo, PointRoll, Twitter and Yahoo.

Standard metrics like impressions, click-through-rates, and traffic sources will be pulled and managed on the campaign-reporting dashboard, divided by Engagement, Amplification and Equity. There will also be social-media specific data points: commenting, blog posts, sentiment, widget adoption, Twitter activity, social bookmarking, and organic search ranking.

"Consumers do more than view Web pages and click on ads," said Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google. "They engage with websites and marketing messages in ways that require a dramatic evolution in how companies measure success."

The CM toolbox will be available exclusively for select FM customers, like Intel and Best Buy, but will open to more brands in early 2009.

The company is hosting a Conversational Marketing Summit in San Francisco today and tomorrow.