I’m going to climb out on a limb here and bet that there’s a large contingent of marketers out there that wish some of the more arcane social media channels would just go away. Not all, and maybe even not most. But for a not inconsiderable segment of the consumer and B-to-B marketing populations, things like Twitter, Foursquare, Brightkite and Gowalla are just too hard to figure out.

I’m not talking about the mechanics, although keeping up with what’s new and popular in these increasingly popular channels certainly does require work. No, I’m talking about the effort of figuring out how their brands, products and services can successfully participate in the grass-roots activity taking place day and night in these channels without breaking the code of etiquette that penalizes old-school marketing behavior—i.e., one-way messaging and relentless self-promotion—while rewarding messaging that fits into the social atmosphere with retweets, check-ins, viral sharing and (dare we hope?) Web site clickthroughs and conversions.

Admittedly, this is just an observation on my part based on anecdotal conversations and reading the comments that attach to almost any press item about “Twitter quitters” or the lack of measurable ROI from location-based services. The notion that these inexplicable consumer behaviors will in time die out (Second Life, anyone?) seems to relieve some marketers of the burden to investigate them and find out what part—if any—they have to play in these seemingly inscrutable social exchanges.

None, they’ve concluded. And therefore the behaviors can’t last.

But they are lasting, and they’re attracting growing audiences, whether or not marketers can figure out how to turn that popularity to their advantage.

If it’s location-based social networks that puzzle you—those “check-in” networks that let people ascend to the mayoralty of their local coffee shop/ copy shop/ blind alley—then you probably weren’t too jazzed to find out that Facebook Places will let Foursquare, Gowalla and other users check in via their profile pages. That’s some 500 million Facebook users who might get motivated to at least check out what role LBS can play in their lives.

What’s the marketing angle? Facebook isn’t making that explicit as yet. The company is big enough to strike some powerful deals for coupons, discount offers or other location-related features.

But rest assured, marketers: If your prospective customers are using these platforms, your job just got more complicated.

Facebook comes in for its own share of schadenfreude (that feeling of happiness when someone else has bad things happen) every time it makes a privacy misstep. Remember “Quit Facebook Day”, May 31? About 34,000 of Facebook’s 500 million global members made a pledge to leave the social network over its sudden expansion of its Open Graph sharing policy.

And that’s the number who signed the online pledge. No accurate count on how many of those followed through. Fifty percent? Ten percent? One?

Not that everyone loves everything about social media. Last month Facebook earned one of the lowest ratings in this year’s American Customer Satisfaction Index: 64 on a 100 point scale, skimming the bottom right alongside airlines and cable companies. MySpace fared worse, with a 63 index. By contrast, YouTube came in at 73, and Wikipedia trounced the rest of the Web sites tested with a 77. (You can go here to download the e-business report from ForeSee Results containing these findings.)

But those low rankings haven’t kept new members from joining. Facebook is rapidly becoming a Web utility with an impermeable protective coating. Like Google, we may complain about its changing rules and spreading popularity. But it’s the site we reach for when we want to do what it does best.

As for Twitter, some interesting recent research from digital agency 360i reveal why it’s so problematic for marketers: because it’s just not about them. (The ACSI rankings did not test Twitter’s popularity because so many users reach it indirectly through third-party apps.)

The report finds that 91% of tweets come from consumers, while only 8% originate with brands. (About 0.4% of the remainder come from celebrities, Ashton Kutcher, Paris Hilton and the like.) More importantly, 43% of those consumer tweets are conversational; they begin with “@”, meaning that they are directed at one specific person and only secondarily shared with the rest of the Twitter population.

That reality differs from the picture drawn by Twitter hitters, the channel’s critics, who suggest that it’s a medium for self-indulgent navel-gazing of the “I’m in line for a latte” variety. Those personal status updates make up 24% of the consumer-generated traffic on Twitter, 360i finds. (Download a .pdf of the report here .)

Meanwhile, only 12% of tweets mention a specific brand, the report finds. Unsurprisingly, those mentions are most often of brands in social networking (22%) and tech (17%). Other strong buzz categories on Twitter include entertainment brands (17%), general Web sites (6%), restaurants/ food (5%) and music (5%).

Overall, Only 21% of consumer tweets using brand names give voice to an opinion about the brand they mention. While most of these opinions (82%0 still fall into the neutral/ informational category, some do profess explicit judgments on the brands. The good news: 11% of the tweets studied by 360i are positive, while only 7% reflect negative views of the brands they mention. That should be good news for those brands who’ve reportedly been getting involved in social media out of fear they’re being trashed without their knowledge.

But the 360i report is less reassuring about how effectively brands are dipping into the twitstream. While consumers see Twitter as primarily a conversational medium (43% of tweets directed to an @, remember), only 1% of those brand mentions by consumers are part of an actually conversational exchange.

Meanwhile, three in four tweets from marketers are basically broadcast messages sending out news and information about their brand, product or service, and only 16% of those marketer tweets consist of active dialogues with consumers.

The conclusion 360i comes to—inescapable, I think—is that most marketers have not solved the problem of how to insinuate themselves into the organic activity already going on within Twitter.

Face it, marketers. The activity going on inside Twitter, and to a large degree in Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and the other new social channels, is not about selling and not about you. If you want to be present in those venues you’re going to have to get a lot more creative about what you bring to the party and how you engage.

That’s a challenge for many marketers at a time when they’re having enough trouble activating in their more traditional channels. While a few notable Twitter brand successes exist, for example (Comcast for customer service, Dell and JetBlue for deals, Zappos and Starbucks for promoting their community and culture), the fact that we can all name them suggests how badly other marketers are doing there at present.

That will need to change. More marketers will have to pay close attention to where earned social media fit into their marketing mix, if only to do some competitive blocking as needed. The other alternative is to hope that Facebook, Twitter and now the location-based services die back and cease to matter to consumers.

Anyone willing to bet that will happen? Because I’m covering those bets.