It’s a simple idea, really. Sales in the social media world should be about conversation. It should be about engaging the consumer in a meaningful way, because doing so allows your brand to stand out. Your brand marketing becomes something distinct in its ability to reach out to others. That’s the idea.

It’s simple. It’s so simple.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

MediaPost reported today that brand marketers are no better at reaching out to talk to people than they’ve ever been. Particularly on Twitter, recent data concludes that these marketers are simply not adept at talking to people. They’re getting good at using Twitter to figure out the consumer’s needs, sure. But they’re not actively engaging in conversation; if anything, they’re driving wedges in between.

Digital marketing firm 360i conducted a six month study of Twitter trends. What they found was that people over that period continue to tweet. Only one in ten, however, comes from a marketer. Only 12% of the consumer tweets mention any particular kind of brand. When they do mention a brand, most of the time it has something to do with a social network, followed by entertainment and technology.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter is the top mentioned brand, followed by Apple and Google in that order.

Of note is the power of celebrity on Twitter. A normal person may have 300 friends; a celebrity has a thousand times that. And, because of their reach, they tend to see an amazing amount of retweets.

So what’s going wrong here? Why aren’t the conversations happening?

The study’s findings are enlightening. The marketers are talking, yes. But they’re talking at people, rather than with people. The study found that 43% of all tweets are conversational – replies to what he said or she said – yet only 12% of marketing tweets showed active dialogue with the consumers.

Only 1% of consumer tweets that mention a brand come out of any kind of conversation with the brand.

In short, there are a lot of opportunities to step into a talk, but most brand marketers just aren’t stepping in. What’s happening more is that brands are using Twitter as a sounding board. They listen to conversations in an unfiltered environment to get an idea of how their products are doing. And who can blame them? 360i found that an overwhelming amount of tweets were about the personal lives of the users.

The big mistake, it seems, is that these brand marketers find their way into these conversations – setting up an account to begin the conversation – and then give up part way through.

Let’s say you go to a party and strike up a conversation… The other person starts talking, but you just walk away. (Sarah Hoffstetter, 360i SVP, Emerging Media and Brand Strategy

Perhaps this has something to do with a failure to set goals. Hoffstetter says that any company who wants to pursue this needs to set up goals and certain performance indicators to measure the ROI.

After all, you’re having these conversations for a reason. You may as well get something from it.