What's next? 255 With standard analytics we can measure what people are doing and when. Where things tend to fall down is when it comes to pinpointing the one thing people really want to know: why. Why are people abandoning their shopping cart at stage X? Why aren't people who click on ad Y going on to sign up for our newsletter? Why aren't visitors clicking through to deeper content pages on our website? Why won't people engage with our latest social media campaign? Analytics are great for collecting, aggregating and reporting on the where and the when ­ the quantitative empirical data of online transactions. Clicks, impressions, visits... all straightforward, all measurable: observable actions where one equals one, two equals two, etc. However, quantitative data alone can never truly describe the subtleties of human behaviour. And therein lies the problem ­ because the brave new world of conversa- tional marketing that we've described, where consumer engagement reigns supreme, is all about identifying and responding to the subtleties of human behaviour and interaction. But how do you accurately measure qualitative concepts like engagement, influence, trust and authority in a repeatable and comparable way? How do you consistently and comparably measure the evolution of online conversation? There are already plenty of speculative suggestions, theories and formulae out there, but little consensus to date. Over time, gradual consensus will