Remember the Conversation Index? BusinessWeek does. According to Sam Whitmore, their new “engagement editor” Shirley Brady is using what Stowe Boyd called the Conversation Index as one of the key measurements of the success of its online engagements. Since she’s been on board the ratio of comments to posts has more than doubled.

All signs point to the fact that BusinessWeek gets it. David Kaplan wrote on paidContent.org in April that:

John Byrne, BusinessWeek Online editor-in-chief, feels most [publishers'] efforts haven’t really gone beyond the introduction of reader comments on stories. Aside from making comments appear more prominently across the McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP) site’s channel pages and stories, Byrne wants to elevate some of the most prolific commenters to the level of regular contributors…

This is a very smart strategy. As just one example, BusinessWeek’s reputation in the social media community grew by leaps and bounds when senior writer Steve Baker sourced a microblogging article on Twitter.

I see a lot of outlets relaunch their online presence with new graphics, new looks and new feels. Now you can comment on their articles, but nobody does. Circulation numbers and web traffic stats are all well and good, but they’re only a small part of the picture these days. You need to be able to track more than just eyeballs to see the big picture. BusinessWeek gets this, and is using reader feedback to drive editorial innovation.

This is exactly what was missing from all of the wonderful discussions I heard over at Enterprise 2.0 last week. It’s great that you have a brand new wiki that your employees are using to improve productivity, but what if all you’re doing is delivering what your customers don’t want more quickly? Why aren’t we hearing more about innovation like what BusinessWeek and eBags are doing?

This week’s eWeek heralded in the age of “CRM 2.0″ in an article on how Oracle and Salesforce.com are helping companies innovate by helping improve customer engagement, and I look forward to discussions about dropping other firewalls between the enterprise and the customer. (Incidentally, eWeek could use a little Web 2.0 help by making its print articles easier to find online, for the life of me I can’t find a link to their article about Web 2.0 innovation. Ironic? eWeek needs to borrow a page or two from the BusinessWeek playbook.)

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: BusinessWeek, comments, conversation, conversation index, CRM, e20, enterprise 2.0, eWeek, innovation, Social Media, socialmedia, web 2.0, web20, wikis