• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 12, 2013

In a major shift for marketers that have traditionally waited for results, social feedback tools from LinkedIn and Switch now gauge content and campaign performance at the speed of a text message or Twitter tweet.

This gives social media the features that marketers find invaluable in search engine marketing.

LinkedIn’s SlideShare created a feedback loop for marketers in its series of Pro product suite apps, a paid service geared toward marketing experts. It houses presentations, documents and videos on brand channels. The tool, Send Tracker, released Tuesday, allows marketers to manage and track content, as well as develop sales leads, from the social site through emails.

Marketers upload content into SlideShare to share publicly or privately and attach it to an email. Send Tracker follows how they interact with it. Users receive a real-time notification via email when recipients look at the content. It records how much time the person spent on each page and whether they clicked or copied the content.

Ross Mayfield, director of business development at SlideShare, said the real-time feedback also gives marketers knowledge to better educate existing and prospective clients on confusing features or technical specs. The tool also runs on mobile.

Real-time measurement tracking, analytics and reporting tools exist in sites like Twitter, but not all platforms provide instant gratification.

That's one reason that Switch created and launched a tracking tool that the company dubbed SMRT, the Switch Mobile reporting tool that is intended to help marketers plan, schedule, measure, and track performance of experiential marketing campaigns in real-time.

The software tool lives on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone to provide a broad view of real-time marketing, from the quality and length of engagement to the number of people sampling the product in the shortest time for the lowest cost.