Philip Sheldrake's introduction to social web/social media analytics as of 2008. SWA is defined by Sheldrake as "the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation's sentiment and influence."

In other words, these are some methods for discovering, monitoring, and quantifying what a particular group is saying online, what they're saying about a given topic, or simply what audience (if any) can be identified by its conversations about a given topic.