Community is an ideal toward which all social networks should aspire. In a true community, everybody is pulling for everybody else, sharing whatever assistance, expertise, and insight they possess with anybody who might benefit.

We all know that most communities are a bit more one-sided than that. In most communities, most people are essentially there for the ride, contributing little while benefiting from whatever resources the more generous among them have chosen to share. This is not necessarily a criticism of individuals or of society in general, but rather a recognition that as communities scale beyond close personal relationships, the bonds of reciprocity and altruism often grow weak.

This truism applies just as much to customer communities as to any other. Enterprises have avidly adopted social networks as virtual extensions to such customer relationship management (CRM) functions as call centers and user groups. In the new world of social-network customer communities leveraging blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other channels, it is not uncommon that a handful of individuals post most of the useful content and feedback while the majority simply consume without contributing. And that’s fine, as long as you keep encouraging and incentivizing these actively engaged individuals —whom Forrester refers to as CRM highly empowered and resourceful operatives (HEROes) — to keep the useful content coming. In the final analysis, these are the sorts of individuals — expert customer service professionals, longtime customers, or even highly enthusiastic hobbyists — who can spell all the difference between true community and a haphazard scattering of nominally affiliated strangers.

As an industry analyst, I’m part of the professional class that delights in defining standard marketplace terminology. More than that, many of us spend our working lives coaxing industry to march under marketing banners aligned with our pet definitions.

Yes, indeed, each analyst likes to feel that his or her marketecture terminology should rule school. Last month I did a Forrester podcast on a topic that’s extremely hot right now: leveraging the power of social media and social networks to manage your brand, drive marketing and sales campaigns, and manage ongoing customer relationships. In that session, I discussed the role of analytics in social media for multichannel customer relationship management (CRM).

My initial impetus for the podcast was to spell out the chief distinctions between two terms that, on first glance, appear almost synonymous: social media analytics and social network analysis. During the podcast I also trucked in another related closely related term—social media monitoring—and even alluded to social intelligence and other phrases that have gained currency.

What follows, for those of you who don’t listen to podcasts, or can’t find them, is the gist of what I said on this topic: