Most entrepreneurs would be happy to get one company off the ground. Christine Mason McCaull and Chip Roberson are not like most entrepreneurs.

Instead of concentrating on launching a single entity, Mason McCaull and Roberson—Sonoma, California residents who met and became friends while working on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign—decided to take their big idea to help firms measure their social-media engagement and split it into two distinct companies.

That’s two companies for two people (backed up with several contract programmers, product managers, designers, and writers). One company is a consulting firm, while the other is a software business—and it’s this operation the partners believe will be the one most likely to get big fast.

Mason McCaull says they made that decision so the software business would be a “clean vehicle,” one that would attract potential investors by having a “valuation that was based solely on its revenue model.” The hope is that model will grow more quickly if it is a software-only company rather than either a combination software-consulting company or solely a consulting company.

What Mason McCaull and Roberson are doing is just the kind of out-of-the box thinking that’s necessary today. A decade or so ago, the two would probably already be sitting on a pile of venture capital money plotting an initial public offering party. But those days are gone, and these times require careful thinking to both draw investment for a new enterprise and succeed once that investment comes.

The genesis for the two-company approach started in early 2009 when they saw an opportunity in measuring the impact a company’s interactions on the exploding social-media scene and how this new form of communication impacted a prospective client’s sales, bottom line, and image. So the two partnered on their first company, Clickmarkets, to invent metrics to measure a company’s engagement with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other players in the social-media space. The idea, according to Mason McCaull, is to help companies “to understand what is being said about their brands and to publish to all their profiles from one interface.”

The potential is huge. Mason McCaull estimates that 35 percent of the money spent on Google AdWords, the primary source of Google’s $5.06 billion in revenue in the first quarter, could move into social media.

Eric Straser, a venture capital partner with Mohr Davidow, says billions of dollars are circling the Web-publishing scene, waiting for a final place to roost. That place is likely to include a hefty dose of social media.

“The world is still shifting and there’s kind of a trillion dollars sloshing around between advertisers and media properties, and the infrastructure to determine and the opportunities to determine how much shifts to the Web is still in inning two or three of a nine-inning game,” he says.

Mason McCaull and Roberson set out to invent a suite of software to measure a company’s social-media footprint and to determine if it was having the impact it intended. Within the first five months of shopping their idea around and demonstrating an early version of their tools, they drew at least a dozen clients.

But they quickly learned that before Clickmarkets could develop and market a final, polished software product, they had to convince prospective clients what social media and the power of the Web could do for business. Whether they wanted to or not, they became consultants, and time spent talking with companies about their Web strategies took time away from developing software to help companies maximize their Web presence.

“We started Clickmarkets with the idea of doing a software company. But we ended up doing a ton of services, nonscalable services, building websites, writing content, doing logo rework, all that stuff,” Mason McCaull says.