radian6

| eNewsletter | Register for a demo | Customer Login
toll free: 1-888-6RADIAN | local: (506) 452-9039

10 Key Awareness Metrics to Track

By Amber Naslund
Monday, March 15, 2010 | 3 Comments
Tags: , ,
Posted in: Measurement and Metrics, Social Media

Radian6 - 10 Key Awareness Metrics to TrackLast week we drilled down into engagement metrics, so this week let’s take a look at awareness and reach. The reach of your brand is, essentially, a measure of the impression your brand is making online: how far it’s moved across the Web and how many eyes, ears, and mouths are seeing, hearing, and talking about it.

Now, how do you measure reach? It might seem a little fuzzy at first, but these few metrics can provide a foothold in the practice of measuring how far your brand extends — and *how* it extends — out there on the Web.

1. Potential Reach

The most basic of all awareness metrics, looking at the numbers of fans, followers, or “eyeballs” is a pretty fundamental concept. But the more accurate way to look at numbers like this is as *potential* reach, as you’ll never have all of those people paying attention to you simultaneously. Take a look at other elements like peak usage time for specific sites and marry awareness metrics with actual engagement activity to get a closer ratio of potential vs. actual reach at any one time.

2. Mentions Per Time Period

The online equivalent of “impressions”, looking simply at how many times your brand is talked about online during a given time period can give you a sense of overall awareness and chatter. It can be interesting to segment this category of data overall, too, through lenses like “mentions by media type”, to see whether blogs or forums or mainstream media are carrying the bulk of conversation about your brand. And line up this metric with your targeted campaigns or engagement efforts, and get a sense of whether your work drives those numbers up, down, or not at all.

3. Inbound Links

The web analytics standby, inbound links are a solid indicator of the people that are not only aware of you, but are telling other people that they should be aware of you, too. Want to know where in social media you should be spending your time? Look at the sites and media types where the inbound links live to get a sense of the types of media that are driving consistent attention for your brand. And to get some insight into how people refer to you and think of you, pay attention to the anchor text folks use when they create those links, and see if they’re using the terminology to describe your work that you hope they are.

4. Share of Conversation

Share of Voice is a familiar concept, looking at how much you’re mentioned or covered in comparison to, say, the competition. but Share of Conversation measures something a bit more helpful: how often you or your company are mentioned in context of the conversations that are most relevant to you. In other words, if you want to be a leading document management company, how often are folks talking about you when they’re talking about their document management needs? For a bit more detail about how to calculate and measure Share of Conversation, read Marcel Lebrun’s post.

5. Subscribers to Content

Related to potential reach, number of subscriptions can function as both an awareness and an engagement metric. Whether you’re talking email subscribers, blog subscribers, or even subscribers to your print publication, subscriptions represent conscious interest in your content and a focused group of potential reach for that media. And while you often depend on provided “reach” or impression numbers given to you by third parties for advertising placements or the like, subscribers is a number that’s directly attributable to your own content and impact.

6. Referral and Recommendation Ratio

This metric really ends up in the camp of engagement, too, as well as sales. But from an awareness point of view, it can be valuable when looking at the value of increased awareness over time, and whether that correlates with a consistent proportion of recommendations or referrals in and among the other mentions. If you can successfully increase the ratio of direct brand recommendations as an overall share of reach and awareness, you’ll better make a case for designing efforts to reach larger audiences.

7. Brand Recognition

Sometimes asking people if they know about you still works. That can be an informal straw poll on larger social networks, or a more structured survey of a broader audience through something like a market research firm. Sometimes called recall, the idea here is looking at everything from whether people can and do name your brand inside of a relevant market category, or in association with other relevant ideas or concepts. It can be an interesting broad-brush look at whether you’re present in people’s minds in the ways that matter to you.

8. Brand-Specific Searches

Take a look at your analytics traffic for your website, and see what people are typing into search when they’re referred to you. Are they searching for general industry terms, like “car repair shop in Austin”, or are they specifically searching for “Bob’s Repair Shop Austin”? Look at the ratio to brand searches vs. keyword searches and see how that ratio changes over time. Keyword searches represent a broader need, while brand-specific searches are an indicator that you’re being sought out specifically.

9. Sentiment Trends

There’s a lot of talk about sentiment and what it can or can’t tell you. What we at Radian6 chat a lot about is the value of sentiment as a trend metric, looking at the volume and ratio increase, decrease, or stagnation over a broader time period. While impressions can tell you volume of mentions, coupling them with sentiment trends can tell you whether the brand impression overall is favorable or not. Want to get really granular? Start dissecting, say, the positive sentiment segment and look at the makeup. Are they mostly compliments? Recommendations? Nice words about your staff?

10. Content Resonance

Also firmly with a foot in the engagement camp, watching how content gets shared across the web will also certainly point you toward how many people are seeing what you’re up to. Along with first level shares and spread of your content – the tweets, subscription impressions, website hits – you can also dig into the notion of secondary reach. That means looking at who in your network reshared and passed along your content: retweets, reblogs, shares, or inbound links from spinoff content. Add a time series layer to that – how long the shares and reshares continue to trickle out to the web – and you’ll start seeing the kinds of content that reverberate well.

As we talked about in the post about 10 Key Engagement Metrics to Track, single metrics on their own aren’t really worth much. The real trick is to connect the dots and tie them together so that you can see how several measurements, in tandem, point to progress toward your business goals.

So what are you tracking that indicates reach and awareness in your world? How are you using those measurements to correlate with your sales and engagement data? Would love to hear from you in the comments.

The Social Contract eBook from The Social Customer

By Teresa Basich
Friday, March 12, 2010 | 2 Comments
Tags: , ,
Posted in: Community, Listening, Social Media

The social phone. It seems like a fairly simple concept, right? That’s essentially what a phone is, a tool or channel that allows people to connect to one another. We look at social media as the social phone – it’s the place where people can “call up” the brands and companies they want to talk to, to chat customer service and much, much more. And right now, it’s the responsibility of brands and companies to answer the social phone and talk with their customers over the channels they choose to use to communicate.

The good folks at The Social Customer put together a comprehensive ebook that hones in on the essence of customer service and the idea of answering the social phone, and we’re glad we could be a part of its creation. Our VP of Marketing, David Alston, helped round out this valuable conversation, which also touched on concepts like:

  • The value of customer communities, for both customers and organizations.
  • The very real opportunity of monetizing a branded community.
  • Being available to your customers via their channels of choice.
  • Aligning your organization to encourage customer feedback and integrate that feedback into future product and service plans.
  • The importance of solidifying the foundation of customer service in your organization before diving into social media.

This ebook is filled with use cases and advice from some of the social media, customer service, and CRM industries’ most valuable players. We recommend you download it and take a read through to see how the growing collaborative relationships between businesses and customers are shifting the practice of customer service into high definition.

March ebook: Social Media Measurement & Analysis

By Teresa Basich
Thursday, March 11, 2010 | 1 Comment
Tags: , ,
Posted in: Measurement and Metrics, Social Media

As you probably know by now, March is all about social media measurement and analysis here on the Radian6 blog. We’re here to help get you thinking about which metrics are a fit for your particular goals and objectives, and get you started measuring them to produce meaningful insights. So we pulled together an ebook of epic proportions for you to download that covers the basics of getting started measuring your social media programs.

We’ve broken down each chapter by metric type, with the first chapter providing some context and caveats for you to consider before diving into the meat of this ebook.

The second chapter covers metrics for establishing the awareness, attention, and reach of your brand by breaking down what each particular metric really means, giving you and idea of which pieces of the social media pie fall under the umbrella of those metrics, and offering up a step-by-step process as to how to measure each.

Chapters 3 and 4 follow that same format and cover metrics for leads, conversions, sales, and cost savings. In February’s ebook, we also provided a list of metrics you can refer to, to measure the impact of your community building endeavors, and we’ll be tackling that topic down the line, as well.

If you’ve had a tough time figuring out exactly how to track and measure your social media efforts, please don’t hesitate to grab this ebook, and let us know if it helps you find your balance a bit. And please, feel free to ask us any questions you’ve got – we’re here to help!

Radian6 to Launch Engagement Console Desktop Application in April

By Teresa Basich
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 | 7 Comments
Tags: , ,
Posted in: Announcements, Listening, Social Media, Social Media Monitoring, Technology

One of the biggest hurdles to jump in integrating social media into a business is figuring out the most cost-effective and functional way to scale its use. As your organization grows and continues to weave social media into its processes, it will be critical to establish a workflow that extends across departments while still allowing your teams to engage efficiently.

The need for a tool that helps businesses scale and simultaneously streamline their social media working processes is growing by leaps and bounds, which is why we are thrilled to announce the release of our upcoming product, the Radian6 Engagement Console.

Radian6’s new Engagement Console is a desktop application that:

  • Extends social media monitoring, listening, and engagement to every desktop within your company.
  • Is a complete social Web client that lets you listen to all media types, including blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn Answers, Facebook fan pages & public discussion groups, as well as online mainstream news sites.
  • Allows real-time collaboration among your team members and one-click-workflow assignment of posts enabling faster and more cost effective engagement.
  • Ties into the full power of Radian6, so your teams can channel the right conversations to the right people within your enterprise.
  • Records all interactions in Radian6 for comprehensive operational reporting, and conversation analysis and reporting.

The Engagement Console is outfitted with a number of features to help you organize and maximize social media monitoring and engagement throughout your department and company.

Comprehensive Listening Coverage

Customize a listening grid by breaking out your conversation stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks for your Radian6 topic profile can be separated out by media type to keep you in the loop on exactly where people are talking about your brand or area of expertise.

Fast-Moving, Streamlined Workflow

Open up the Workflow function next to your Radian6 conversation stacks to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and watch them respond in real time. Pull up a stack of your own assignments and start engaging on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and conversation threads right from the Engagement Console. For even more efficiency, create one-click workflow buttons that assign priority, status, sentiment, and user assignment to multiple posts all at once.

All the conversations you choose to participate in – and the ensuing engagement between your team and external constituents – will be recorded for reference. Review how your team handled the conversation, any notes they provided, and see how your interaction impacted and rippled through the larger business community.

Multi-Network Integration and Social Profile Viewing

Keep pace with all the activity happening around multiple Twitter accounts as well as your Facebook account with the Engagement Console. Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. For added ease of use, click on the Auto-Shorten URL function.

Follow the activity on Facebook by observing and responding to status updates, wall posts, comments, and “likes”. Also view news feeds for your Facebook friends, see new photos or videos as they’re being uploaded, and leave your own comments and status updates without leaving the Console.

For a more well-rounded and contextual look at the people in your community, click on the name of a particular user to check out their comprehensive social profile, including where they can be found online and a history of interaction, notes you’ve made, and conversations you’ve had with them.

Reporting and Analysis

Within your Radian6 stack, take a look at the post volume for your particular topic profile with the built-in, at-a-glance time series graph. Click through to access the Radian6 dashboard to review and analyze metrics, segment and filter your data for micro-level analysis, and generate reports for your department and management teams.

Want More?

The Engagement Console is currently being previewed and will be available to Radian6 users in April 2010.

If you head on over to our Preview page, you’ll see a form you can fill out to let us know you’re interested in the Engagement Console. We’ll keep you in the loop as things progress and let you know exactly when it launches in April.

We’re excited about this announcement and what the Engagement Console will potentially do to advance the cause of listening and engaging within the enterprise. Have initial questions? Please let us know in the comments!

10 Key Engagement Metrics to Track

By Amber Naslund
Monday, March 8, 2010 | 14 Comments
Tags: , , ,
Posted in: Community, Listening, Measurement and Metrics, Social Media

Ah, engagement. That sticky word that gets discussed an awful lot in context of social media conversations. But how, exactly, do you look at engagement and keep tabs on the factors that drive it?

While no single metric alone is going to be a solid indicator of how engaged your community or customers are, there are a few things you can look at that help guide you toward the conversations and interactions to pay attention to for deeper analysis. Here’s our take on a few of the engagement metrics to watch for.

1. Comments

One of the most popular ways of looking at engagement is how active the discussion is on any one piece of content or post. The quality and value of comments is another discussion altogether, but looking at the spark of conversation ignited by a post can be an interesting indicator of whether folks are listening, and that they’re compelled to speak up and respond.

2. Unique commenters

Some communities are incredibly tight knit or niche, which means that you might have fewer people contributing to the overall dialogue (think the 80/20 rule here). But at a high level, looking at an increase in unique commenters over time can signal not just that you’re reaching more eyes and ears, but that your work is compelling more and more people to emerge and discuss, rather than just a core contingent of fans. After all, the potential rabid fans must first make themselves known.

3. Thread size

Forums are still alive and well, especially in some tech, telco and automotive sectors (to name a few). And if you’ve got a community where you’re posting discussion questions or even FAQs and support items, looking at the length and breadth of the threaded discussion that follows can not only show you how invested your members are, but whether the discussions are proving useful and impactful for them.

4. Time with Content

Some engagement can actually be passive, meaning that the people reading or interacting with the content might be very interested, but quiet. Forrester explains on their Groundswell technographics ladder that there are people in this camp. Sometimes, they might even take your content or ideas as inspiration to create something of their own, and may not say so directly. Sometimes, looking at how long people spend perusing your content or the community discussions can indicate deep interest, even if it isn’t verbalized.

5. Content Downloads

Another popular way of assuming engagement, downloads of content like whitepapers, ebooks, or even blog posts can indicate interest in the subject matter. It’s a little looser in implication since it’s harder to track what happens AFTER the content download without doing some follow up. Are they actually getting around to reading the content and, even better, doing something with it? But looking at downloads can be a great leading indicator of engagement around a topic or subject.

6. Subscriptions

Folks signing up to your blog or newsletter or publication indicates, plain and simple, that they’re interested in what you have to say. And while true engagement is often looked at as something more interactive, subscriptions are the door opener to bring someone into the fold, and give you and them more opportunity to converse, discuss, and iterate on the content and subjects themselves.

7. Content Sharing

Another leading indicator that someone cares about what you’re doing? They tell someone else. Retweets, Stumbles, bookmarks on Delicious, even emails or blog posts. And whether or not they comment actively themselves on a regular basis, they’re demonstrating their perception of value in the material by being willing to share it along to their network. Another interesting look at this kind of statistic: how many of the shares come complete with additional positive commentary (vs. shares that say “ugh, did you SEE this piece of junk?”).

8. Suggestions/Feedback/Comments

If your community is well engaged, they’re going to invest their time and brain power in guiding you toward business improvements. Things like suggestions, product improvement ideas, innovation forums like IdeaStorm, or voting and commenting on proposed ideas can all indicate a vested interest on behalf of the people you’re trying to reach. If they care about what you’re doing and how, you have a great opportunity to line up your efforts better with the needs of the people that drive your work.

9. Spinoff Content

As I alluded to with #4, sometimes folks engage with your content or company by carrying those ideas elsewhere and applying them to expanded ideas. Sometimes that can come in the form of spinoff content, which you can often identify through inbound links, as folks can often link back to the content that originally sparked their idea. If they don’t, listening to topics similar to those you’re discussing can help unearth spinoff content.

10. Recommendations

Recommendations and endorsements sort of have a foot in both the sales metric and engagement metric camp, so we’ll talk more about the sales side in a couple of weeks. But posts and comments that recommend your business to others can be a strong indicator of that person’s connection and level of commitment to you. This is how you start to find those undiscovered evangelists and fans, and empower them with more information and access to act as your ambassador.

Remember about engagement: The metrics above are indicators, not guarantees. The hypothesis here is that by interacting with content or people on a more obvious and consistent basis, the individual is demonstrating a more committed interest in what you’re saying or doing. What you need to understand for yourself is what engagement means to you, in context of what you’re trying to achieve through same.

That  means the real value is in tying any or all of the above metrics into other, more specific measurements that indicate positive progress toward business goals. Correlating comments with increased email subscriptions. Lining up an increase in content downloads with an increase in leads, and better yet, conversion rates for those leads. You can also make a case that anything related to sales could be considered an engagement metric: leads, referrals, sales themselves. We’ll tackle those in a different metrics post later in the month.

And the Ultimate Engagement Metric is still the sale itself. All of these indicators above are designed to help increase the likelihood that someone will pay more attention to you, more often, and eventually buy from you. Let’s face it, we don’t say “yay, we got more comments!” and stop there. We want more comments, because that indicates that we have people’s attention. Attention is currency. More focused  and persistent attention increases the odds that when someone needs to buy what we have, they’ll look to us.

We’ll talk more next week about the top metrics for tracking awareness and reach. In the meantime, when you track engagement, what are you looking for? The comments are open, and we’re waiting to hear from you.

Six Elements of Effective Social Media Benchmarking

By ChuckHemann
Friday, March 5, 2010 | 10 Comments
Tags: ,
Posted in: Guest Blogger, Social Media

Imagine for a second that you are the head of marketing for your company and are considering taking the first steps into the wonderful (and often mysterious) world of social media. You’ve heard all about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the bevy of other tools available to you, but you’re not sure which one makes the most sense for your business. What do you do? Well, hopefully for all involved you don’t turn to the “young” person within your department just because they are young. No, chances are good you will either pull some people together internally for a discussion or turn to your agency (assuming you’re using one).

So you’ve turned to your agency and asked them to help you understand how they leverage social media. What is the first thing they do? Well, they probably wow you with a lot of interesting case studies and statistics demonstrating the power of the tools. It’s at this moment you realize you aren’t Dell, Comcast or Southwest Airlines. What can you do to get the train back on track?

You would be wise to suggest to the agency (hopefully they’ve suggested it themselves) that they do some sort of benchmarking on your behalf. Benchmarking is a critical first step in any program. Whether it’s doing content analysis or surveys, you need to understand where the starting line is for your organization.

Beth Harte wrote a post last year in which she outlined the seven holy grails of PR. One of those holy grails was researched benchmarks. PR, social media, marketing–it almost doesn’t matter. Researched benchmarks are a critical first step toward the success of any campaign.

With that in mind, what are some things you can benchmark when starting your social media campaign?

  1. Share of conversation – My friend David Alston, and Radian6’s VP of Marketing, would likely tell you that social media isn’t all about the eyeballs. I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment, but would say that gauging share of conversation is helpful from at least a brand awareness perspective.
  2. Where conversations are happening – Before you launch headlong into Twitter, it would be helpful to know if your customers are actually there.
  3. Core messaging – Yes, social media isn’t all about pushing core messaging. However, it will be helpful to know what people are saying in reference to your brand. Implicit in that is what, specifically, is driving conversation.
  4. Who is influential – Everyone, and every industry has their own definition on who is influential. Be sure to define, through listening or whatever other means, who is influential in your space before you get started.
  5. Search – If you didn’t know this already, search and social media are inextricably linked. There are plenty of free tools that will show you what people are searching for. What are the key terms people are using? What is on the first page of Google results? Is your brand there?
  6. Web analytics – Similar to search, what shows up on your Web site is equally critical to what’s being said in social media. Know how many unique visitors you have, what the referring sites are and percentage of new vs. returning visitors.

These are just six things that I would recommend you benchmark, but obviously you want to come up with researched benchmarks that make sense for your campaign. What other metrics have you researched? What’s worked well? What hasn’t? Looking forward to hearing your point of view.

Chuck Hemann, a 2010 Society for New Communications Research Fellow, is currently a social media associate for WCG, a global media services company focused on the corporate and product marketing and communications needs of leading healthcare companies. You can follow Chuck on Twitter.

Radian6 and Deep Focus Partner for MSN Oscar Coverage

By Rob Begg
Thursday, March 4, 2010 | 1 Comment
Tags: , , , ,
Posted in: Social Media, Social Media News

This year’s Oscars have been an active topic on social networks even before the nominees were announced on February 2nd. With high-profile nominees such as Avatar and Meryl Streep up against breakout contenders such as The Hurt Locker and Gabourey Sidibe, there is no shortage of opinion and posts.

MSN.com has created a destination for fans interested in following the social media trends of the nominees. The MSN Award Buzz page features visualizations of the conversations online and predicts the winners. The application tracks public mentions across forums, blogs, news articles, Twitter, and comments for nominees in the Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress categories.

Predictions for award winners are made based on the volume and sentiment of these mentions. The predictions are then compared to expert picks from MSN sources in a graphic that visualizes both the volume and tone of the posts. You can also explore recent and relevant posts from the social web.

Created for MSN by interactive agency Deep Focus and Radian6, MSN Award Buzz launched just after the nominees were announced and has been tracking all the online Oscar-focused conversations leading up to this weekend’s show. Deep Focus created the cool application and visualization while Radian6’s platform powers the collection and analysis of social media mentions and feeds the application.

The overall buzz surrounding the Oscars has really begun to pick up with the show just a few days away. But don’t worry if you can’t catch it all—the MSN Award Buzz application will continue tracking the pulse of the online space live throughout the award’s ceremony. Check it out and see how your predictions compare with those of the experts and the public.

Breaking Down the Details of Community Building with eROI

By Teresa Basich
Friday, February 26, 2010 | 2 Comments
Tags: , , ,
Posted in: Clients & Customers, Community, Social Media

We’ve spent the month of February chatting with you about how to build community, from giving you tips on how to find where your community is hanging out, to identifying some tactics for showing your community members appreciation. Heck, we’ve even written a (e)book on the subject.

But sometimes, the best breakdowns are not in explanations, but in examples, and the folks at eROI have offered to share a great example of a community they built from the ground, up, for Wacom Technology Corporation, a leading creative technology firm whose products are renowned throughout the design industry.

To give you an idea of eROI’s community building clout, the Portland-based interactive agency has been building and launching communities since 2004 for iconic brands and products including Konami (think Dance Dance Revolution) the Seattle Seahawks, and the Justin Timberlake-HBO concert series.

For the Wacom Community specifically, the eROI team took a multi-phase approach, releasing three preliminary communities before launching the final community in beta in spring of 2009. Through multiple iterations, they were able to see what features and content community members responded most strongly to, how they interacted with that content (both created by the brand and by other members), and compile insights from each successive community that directly contributed to the final Wacom Community offering.

Dylan Boyd, Vice President of Sales & Strategy for eROI, says there are a few key truths to building and maintaining a successful, thriving community:

  1. Your community must be owned. Often, a community is launched without any set definitions of who owns what. In beginning talks with clients, Boyd makes sure to address the issue of ownership and find out who within the company will have command of various community pieces. He adds that communities can benefit from promoting community members into management-type roles, removing some of the internal workload and solidifying trust within the community.
  2. You must let your community go. Pay attention to what’s happening in your community and monitor member interactions, but don’t strive to control the conversations and activity that are happening. The more you control, the less people participate. It all goes back to trust.
  3. Figure out how to mobilize your community. Boyd drives home the point that a community doesn’t just exist within the confines of your online community, and can’t thrive in a silo. Find opportunities outside your community, and offline, even, to continue driving community participation.

Want to learn more about eROI’s work with Wacom? Take a look at the case study they put together (link at the end of this post) detailing the ins and outs of each particular Wacom community they built, statistics and results demonstrating the success of those communities, and some great information about how the achievements of each community directly linked back to the goals Wacom had set for its community building efforts.

Have examples of awesome brand communities you’d like to share? Please do! The comments are yours.

eROI Case Study: Wacom Community: Mastering the 5 C’s
What goes into building the most engaging and successful online communities?

Follow along as we take you through the journey and progression of the communities built by eROI for Wacom Technology Corp. Learn all about how to harness the power of your audience to create a successful online community.

Social Media and the Big Picture: The American Red Cross’ Haiti Relief Efforts

By Teresa Basich
Thursday, February 25, 2010 | 2 Comments
Tags: , ,
Posted in: Community, Social Good, Social Media

When a devastating earthquake hit the country of Haiti in early January, it was no surprise that the American Red Cross was one of the first emergency response organizations to jump to its aid. Since the quake, the ARC has allocated more than $80 million to help survivors, and has been supplying much-needed food, water, and shelter items to quake victims. In addition, countless volunteer teams from the worldwide Red Cross movement have been sent to Haiti to provide frontline assistance.

The Red Cross’ involvement in social media seems to be a natural progression for a non-profit centered around outreach and community, and the unprecedented response from people on the organization’s multiple social media channels after the quake is proof the Red Cross is doing something very right on the social web.

The First 24 Hours

“The first 24 hours [after the quake] were about getting information out there,” said Gloria Huang, social media specialist for the ARC. Huang is half of the Red Cross’ social media team, which also includes social media manager Wendy Harman. The ARC was able to release a short video providing detailed information about the state of the island and its residents on the organization’s YouTube channel just five hours after the quake.

During the days immediately following the quake, Huang and Harman monitored activity on the ARC’s various social media outlets – which include the ARC’s Disaster Online Newsroom, the Red Cross blog, its Twitter stream, multiple Facebook pages and groups, and a YouTube channel – to make sure the information being circulated and discussed was accurate and as up-to-date as possible.

“We provided the latest facts and figures from the ground and just tried to make sure that what we had across our social media platforms was consistent across the board,” said Huang.

Different Networks Have Different Needs

One of the more interesting developments on the Red Cross’ various social media outlets has been the clear distinction of user needs on each platform. “On Facebook, we have tons of fans, and a lot of them have previous experience with us,” Huang said. “So there’s a lot of discussion on Facebook. It’s a lot like a forum, where people are helping each other.”

Specifically, volunteers from previous campaigns were offering tips and advice to and answering the questions of those interested in volunteering for the Haiti relief efforts.

On the Red Cross’ main blog, firsthand accounts, photos, and videos have been posted with unerring regularity, and the Twitter account remains a source of news, links to donation pages, and updates from the ground.

Findings, Lessons Learned, and Next Steps

The Red Cross’ social media team has never seen the kind of traffic on its social media sites as it has for this relief campaign. While Red Cross aid to Haiti is ongoing, Harman and Huang are planning to take a big-picture look at the results of their work during those first few weeks after the earthquake to see what worked and where there’s room for improvement.

From an observational standpoint, Huang said it was interesting to see which topics received the most attention. “It’s interesting to see what peoples’ minds first jump to, what they want to know immediately. In this case, it’s been ‘How can I help?’” she said.

Huang added that the key to this particular campaign was making sure they were consistently spreading the information people were looking for across their social networks, and that that same information was easy to find on the Red Cross website.

“We’re excited to work into future exploration of how we can use social media and crowdsourcing to improve communication during these times,” Huang said. Along with reviewing the details of this campaign, Harman and Huang are looking at the social media efforts of other emergency aid organizations to gather additional ideas for bolstering their communication efforts during crises.

One fact that was reinforced for the Red Cross social media team during the weeks following the Haiti earthquake: social media is incredibly powerful.

Former SalesForce.com CMO Tien Tzuo Joins the Radian6 Board of Directors

By Teresa Basich
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 | Add a Comment
Tags: , , ,
Posted in: Announcements

Radian6 is happy to announce that Tien Tzuo, former SalesForce.com CMO and current CEO of Zuora, Inc., has joined the Radian6 board of directors.

Tzuo joined SalesForce.com in 1999 as one of the driving forces behind the company’s development. He held a variety of executive roles during his nine years with the company and eventually served as its chief marketing officer and chief strategy officer. Tzuo personally oversaw the vision, direction, and design of Salesforce’s award-winning product line, helping to grow the firm into a multi-billion-dollar company and one of the most successful Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies to date.

Currently, Tzuo is founder and CEO at Zuora, a subscription billing leader that helps companies of all sizes build, manage, and grow their subscription businesses. Backed by Benchmark and Mark Bernioff, Zuora was built from the ground up by SaaS industry visionaries and veterans from organizations such as SalesForce.com, WebEx, Postini (now Google), and Oracle.

Tzuo’s experience building highly successful companies and his enthusiasm for helping expand Radian6’s innovation and leadership within the social media monitoring and measurement industry make him an invaluable addition to the Radian6 board.

Please see the full press release for more information about Tzuo and Radian6.