I love my job because I get to find out what people are talking about online, communicate, engage using social media everyday. But what has always been ‘challenging’ was monitoring and measuring. That was until I started using Radian6.
So what is Radian6?
Well, there is a sentence on the Radian6 website that sums it up very nicely:
Radian6 gives you a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web
And it does exactly what it says on the tin!
As I said, one of my main challenges was setting up a dashboard that would monitor and provide me with exactly the information I needed. But since I started using it I now log into my dashboard everyday without any concerns that I might have missed something. I’ve tried several other monitoring tools – some paid, some free and in my honest opinion Radian6 wipes the floor with them…
Radian6 is intuitive, well designed and easy to create up to 8 ‘unique’ dashboards for what you want to specifically monitor – your’re really not bound by any constraints, unlike some other monitoring tools. And rather being supplied with 1000′s of posts that just contain certain keywords and phrases – e.g. sales type posts etc – you can filter out all that noise and monitor/engage with conversations that you need to be aware of that have been posted on:
- blogs
- images
- videos
- forums
- micro-media
- comments
- forum replies
- mainstream news
Radian6 Features
Dashboard
People say a picture paints a thousand words so here’s one I made earlier 
The above is how I like to set up my dashboard. These are the dashboard widgits and there are 44 different widigts to choose, from 6 different categories, and these are all worth mentioning:
-
Basic Widgits
River of News
Topic Conversation Cloud
Topic Analysis by Media Type
Topic Trends
Influencers -
Social Media Metrics and Analysis
Trend Topic by Media Type
Topic by Language
Topic by Region
Top Viewed Videos and Images
Topic Sentiment Trends
Metrics: Volume Comparison
Metrics: Total Comment Comparison
Metrics: Video Views Comparison
Metrics: Total Vote Count Comparison
Metrics: Follower Reach Comparison
Metrics: Total Inbound Links Comparison
Metrics: Total Unique Sources Comparison -
Twitter Analysis
Top Tweeters
Tweet Volume Trend
Tweet Volume by Region
Tweet Volume by Language
Share of Twitter Follower Reach
Twitter Share of Unique Voices -
Brand Analysis
My Brand River of News
Brand Cloud
Brand Mention Count by Media Type
Unique Source Count by Media Type
Brand Trends by Sentiment
Positive Sentiment Brand Cloud
Negative Sentiment Brand Cloud -
Competitive & Industry Intelligence & Analysis
My Competitors River of News
Competitor Cloud
Competitive Trends
Share of Voice
My Industry River of News
Industry Cloud
Share of Conversation
Industry Trends
Share of Conversation by Comments
Share of Unique Voices -
Workflow & Engagement
My Tasks
Assignment Breakdown
Engagement Status Breakdown
Content Classifications
With this amount of possibilities you’d be hard pushed not to be able to listen/monitor and engage and it’s difficult to point out what I like best… But other than what you’d expect me to say: metrics etc etc etc, I think the Workflow & Engagement Widgits are fantastic. The ability to assign conversations to specific team members and then review the audit trail is an amazing tool that will not only enable organisations to train team members on different scenarios using real information but it will ensure that social media policies and procedures are being followed – proactively.
Sneak Peak of Radian6 Engagement Console
And the exciting news is that Radian6 are very soon going to release an Engagement Console that is a complete real-time social web client, will help you coordinate team social media engagement across the business, shows topic profiles right alongside personal or business Twitter and Facebook streams, lets you set one-click workflow for frequently used post routing, assignment, and classification and feeds all this data back to your Radian6 dashboard for reporting and analysis. Amazing…!
…And finally
Having a fantastic product is one thing… but what convinced me to ‘sign up’ to Radian6 was their customer service. And I want to thank Tom List, Rhiannon Cassin, Paul Taylor (6Consulting website – 6consulting on twitter) and Mike Huggard (Radian6) for making it the easiest decision I’ve ever had to make.
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Lee, I have had the opportunity, albeit brief, to see you use this a couple of weeks ago, and the level of information and feed that it supplies to you is astonishing, and scary. It amazed me that there was such a tool to use, and obviously Radian6 seems to be the best on the market at present! I wonder what they will bring out to better this next???
Hi Lee,
Thanks for the review of Radian6. As you correctly state there are exciting developments on the way, which I very much look forward to showing you!
Thanks
Hi Paul
It is amazing how detailed the info can be and how easy it is to 'drill-down' into what conversations are taking place and where.
What I also like about Radian6 is the facility to identify the 'other' social networking platforms that a specific user is registered on. This is really important as it may not be appropriate to respond to a post/comment that they've left on a particular platform – and having this facility provides 'options' as to where the 'best place' is.
Thanks for posting Paul
Hi Tom
You're welcome. Can't wait to see the 'new developments' that Radian6 is working towards – especially the new engagement dashboard using Adobe Air
Speak soon and thanks for your comment
Hi Lee,
I've been thinking about Radian6 for a while now but what's put me off so far is that I'm generally dealing with smaller SME's who have relatively little or no SM activity as yet. They are employing my services to help them get into the world of SM and hand hold them through this process. They are typically not large brands with conversation going on about them every day. Given this information, do you think Radian6 would be overkill for us to purchase at this moment in time?
Look forward to hearing your thoughts,
Alastair (@banksy6)
Thanks Paul ( @paul_tayloruk ). And I suspect many agencies will take you up on the offer of how to integrate multiple clients into one topic profile…
Maybe even as a follow up guest blog here?
Hi Alastair ( @banksy6 )
The question you've asked is important – but many others spring from it… A simple answer would be YES Radian6 is worth the investment, and this is why. Monitoring the social space for brand mentions (company name, products/services and sentiment) is, IMHO, only 33% of the reason why an organisation of any size should be listening to what's being talked about online… but the remaining 66% is split between monitoring :
a) The industry space and
b) Competitors.
So, although there may not be 'many' (if any) mentions of a particular SME or what they do, the conversations that take place, from a consumer/client perspective – provide invaluable information that will drive the future business and marketing objectives – potentially steering the business in directions that they may not even have considered…
To answer your question on 'overkill'. What always confuses me is that many small businesses don't think anything of spending £200-£300 per month on advertising – some spend a lot more – just because it’s seen as being ‘the thing to do’. But is it effective? Well if < 10% ROI is what they're looking …maybe… but my next question would be, 'What about the 90% that are annoyed or completely ignoring the messaging that's being pushed out?’ To spend a fraction more in order to better understand what people want/need/demand – depending on whether it's a logical or an emotional purchase – is money well invested. (From a personal perspective, if Radian6 was around when I had my small businesses – it would have been a no brainer for me!)
I don't believe that any organisation can effectively focus on social media engagement without knowing what people are talking about and where they are having those 'conversations': blogs, forums, micro-media, social networking platforms etc. Radian6 shows in microscopic detail where these conversations are happening and who the 1% of people at the front of the curve are.
I see, as I'm sure you do, so many organisations that believe that they have a social media strategy in place just because they have a Twitter account! What we as agencies/consultants need to do is educate our clients on the changing face of communications – online and offline – and the importance of the new ROI (return on involvement). And Radian6, for me, features strongly at the heart of that.
Hope that helps
Hi Lee and Alastair,
Alastiar – thanks for your interest in Radian6 and you raise a valid question.
Lee – that's absolutely right and thanks for taking the time to outline the points as you have. The opportunities are often bigger for small companies with a small or non-existent profile in social media. We're seeing SME success where topics / themes in addition to market leading competitors are being tracked rather than just the SME brand or product.
A good tip would be to set search terms to identify conversations where prospects are expressing a need for a product or service.
Other SME client feedback that we've heard is that they feel it's possible to compete in this environment with the bigger companies, whereas competing with the big guys with 'above the line' campaigning is often impossible for budget reasons.
From a R6 perspective we'd be keen to show you how to place multiple SME clients in 1 topic profile and segment the data at dashboard level, this allows you to manage multiple clients for circa £450 per month. The more clients managed in this way, the lower the cost for the solution.
Please feel free to connect with me anytime to chat through further.
Thanks again guys.
Paul
@paul_tayloruk
Thanks Paul ( @paul_tayloruk ). I suspect many agencies will take you up on the offer of how to integrate multiple clients into one topic profile…
Maybe even as a follow up guest blog here?
Hey Lee, that's absolutely no problem, we'll happily provide some content around this for you.
Cheers for now.
Paul
Hi Paul. ( @paul_tayloruk )
That's great. I'll send you an email tomorrow and let's get it posted
Cheers
Lee
Hi Lee,
I just wanted to drop a brief note to say thanks. We appreciate the great review & comments about our product and I'm glad to hear that you have had a great customer service experience as well.
Cheers,
Marcel
CEO, Radian6
@lebrun