"Think of it as the 'Situation Room' of your company," is how HootSuite describes its Command Center, designed to enable companies (large enterprises especially) to command and control all of their social activity, and in real-time.

HootSuite Command Center provides a dashboard view with blocks like "Twitter Daily Retweets," "Twitter Follower Growth," website visits, on and on.

What can that do for a company? HootSuite explains:

• Drive internal and external visibility for a company's social initiatives. Command Center lets you (and management) see KPIs in real time, enabling quicker responses to enhance and protect your brand.
• Activate and coordinate company-wide social resources and activities. Command Center can be used to unite social media, digital marketing, CRM, sales and support, to benefit their specific audiences and monitor their most important metrics as they happen.
• Provide real-time, actionable data for informed decision-making, to optimize performance. Companies leave room for competitors to win if they are NOT engaging clients in real-time across departments.
• Mobilize team members through a suite of apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices. Whether at a coffee shop, airport or in between meetings, you can keep abreast of company metrics in real time, and execute campaigns using HootSuite’s mobile tools (e.g., to manage communities or crises, train or execute campaigns, even conduct market research 24 hours a day, 7 days a week).

HootSuite says it was inspired to create the Social Media Command Center based on ones like it at work for events and organizations like Super Bowl and Gatorade.

Certainly the Center will be useful to marketers, but, to CEOs as well, says HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes. "All the features that make the HootSuite dashboard an invaluable tool for businesses will now be given a throne in the hearts of these same companies; a hub where every social interaction can be seen, studied and spread.

An exciting October for HootSuite, which earlier this month announced its integration with Webtrends to measure the always-elusive return on investment (ROI) of social media. That integration connects social media messages to website conversion stats, which should enable organizations to optimize social strategies and compare social ROI against other digital channels (e.g., SEO, SEM, email, display), using a command center/dashboard view.

In August HootSuite added three apps to its social media management system that it claims helps marketers learn more about their audiences with demographic information; filter social messages to connect with prospective customers; survey their audiences for opinions; and share video to social networks, called SocialBro for Twitter Messaging; GoPollGo; and NeedTagger.