Google Analytics integrates social activities

This is pretty interesting - there are a large number of 'social media monitoring' products around (I work on one), and it looks like Google intend to provide their own here.

To get around the privacy issues with indexing private user data, it looks like they're going for an 'opt-in' model whereby social networks offer to feed data to Google, though it's not clear to me what the benefit(s) for the social network providers will be.

Google Analytics is already a priceless tool for measuring marketing effectiveness, and it makes a lot of sense for Google to bundle social media effectiveness in there too.