Radian6: Taming the social hydra
Jinfo Blog

By Scott Brown

Abstract

If you have your own Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, you probably already have experienced some overload just trying to keep up with all the information coming at you.

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Take a moment to consider how hard it is to keep track of your own incoming social information. If you have your own Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, you probably already have experienced some overload just trying to keep up with all the information coming at you.

Now imagine you’re a global company. You probably have your own active blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to deal with. You also have thousands and thousands of people talking about you on their blogs, making negative videos about your service (http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/ubg/song1/), tweeting good and bad things about you, and talking about your company and your products in a variety of ways.

How do you have any hope of keeping up with it all – much less responding to your customers?

For many organisations, the latest “Holy Grail” quest is effectively to track conversations, sentiment and commentary on social tools. Even more desirable is the ability to respond quickly to those things that need addressing.

I’ve looked at a lot of free tools and found them lacking. One shortcoming of many tools is the ability to provide analysis that is meaningful and actionable. More concerning is the reliability of these tools’ assignment of positive and negative sentiment.

Radian6 is a tool for social media monitoring and customer engagement across a variety of social platforms, including blogs, video, social networks and internet news. The company provides a series of integrated products that can be used by organisations for brand management and monitoring, customer service and lead generation via social tools.

I’d heard about Radian6 for a while, and frankly I was excited to finally see what it could do. After seeing so many poor tools, I honestly didn’t have very high expectations.

I got a demo of Radian6 and I admit that I was wowed by its real-time capture of information (we saw blog entries that were four minutes old), and by its ability to graphically display discussions in social tools on specific topics.

Then I got to use it myself to test it out. When I used it, it was capturing tweets that were less than a minute old. I was further impressed by the integration of the analysis and workflow tools, which allow users to track, and respond to, individual tweets and posts.

Radian 6 is a complex and information-intensive platform, yet the tools are well-integrated and relatively easy to use. The cost of it is not for the casual user. That said, any company that is serious about tracking social media, and the ability to respond and manage their brand online, should take a look at Radian6.

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