Weber Shandwick to roll out the Radian6 solution globally to all employees, supporting the agency’s efforts to present expanded social media intelligence services to clients.  The public relations firm will be the first Interpublic (NYSE: IPG) unit to benefit from a strategic partnership between the IPG Futures Marketing Group and Radian6.

Weber Shandwick Completes Early Adopter Trial With 34 Clients; Part of Radian6′s Strategic Partnership with Interpublic

NEW YORK, November 14, 2007 – Weber Shandwick today announced it will deploy the Radian6 Technologies Inc. social media monitoring solution throughout its offices worldwide, effective immediately. The public relations firm will be the first Interpublic (NYSE: IPG) unit to benefit from a strategic partnership between the IPG Futures Marketing Group and Radian6.

Radian6’s social media monitoring “dashboard” tracks what is being said online about brands, organizations and issues. The program monitors all forms of social media, including blog sites, top video-sharing sites, opinion review forums, photo-sharing sites and micro-blogging platforms. The Radian6 solution offers visually rich analysis with the ability to export graphs and data.   The tool also helps point to the most popular and influential social media thought leaders in a client’s specific industry.

Weber Shandwick has been a strategic development partner with Radian6 for the past eight months. More than 34 of the firm’s clients have participated in its successful Early Adopter Program focused on social media monitoring trials. Weber Shandwick will now roll out the Radian6 solution globally for its employees, supporting the agency’s efforts to present expanded social media intelligence services to clients.

“Radian6 was designed for public relations professionals by public relations professionals. The service offers the most highly customizable features to address the specific social media needs of our clients,” said B. Bonin Bough, executive vice president, screengrabTM, Weber Shandwick’s interactive, social and emerging media group. “By putting these technologies at the fingertips of all our account teams, we are delivering rapid-fire social media monitoring solutions that deliver real-time flagging and analysis of the complete social media landscape.”

“Radian6 is a powerful and flexible social media monitoring technology,” said Bant Breen, president of Interpublic’s Futures Marketing Group. “Our relationship with Radian6 and our recently announced partnership with BzzAgent are important elements of Interpublic’s broader social media strategy to provide an array of cutting-edge solutions that support Interpublic agencies.”

Radian6’s user-friendly web dashboard allows topics to be quickly set-up for monitoring, queries and analysis. Content is delivered to the dashboard in real-time, as it is discovered. This means seeing data earlier, catching issues immediately and getting instant feedback on engagement strategies.

“We are delighted to enter into a global partnership with both Weber Shandwick and Interpublic. We’re confident the company’s agencies and clients will benefit from Radian6’s in-depth monitoring and analysis capabilities,” said Marcel Lebrun, chief executive officer of Radian6. “Our solution’s unique ability to allow agencies to define their own formula weightings for ranking social media influencers will ensure both Weber Shandwick’s and Interpublic’s strategic intellectual property is embedded in the results they share with clients.”

About Weber Shandwick
Weber Shandwick is one of the world’s leading global public relations firms with offices in major media, business and government capitals around the world.  The firm specializes in strategic marketing communications, media relations, public affairs, reputation and issues management, and offers corporate communications counseling services.  Weber Shandwick also provides specialized integrated services including Web relations, advocacy advertising, market research and visual communications.  Weber Shandwick received the highest client-satisfaction honors in the 2007 Agency Excellence Survey by PRWeek U.S. and in 2006, was named Large PR Firm of the Year (PR News U.S.), European Consultancy of the Year (The Holmes Report) and Network of the Year (Asia Pacific PR Awards).  The firm also won the United Nations Grand Award for outstanding achievement in public relations.  To learn more, please visit www.webershandwick.com. Weber Shandwick is a unit of The Interpublic Group (NYSE: IPG).

About Interpublic
Interpublic is one of the world’s leading organizations of advertising agencies and marketing services companies. Major global brands include Draftfcb, FutureBrand, GolinHarris International, Initiative, Jack Morton Worldwide, Lowe Worldwide, MAGNA Global, McCann Erickson, Momentum, MRM Worldwide, Octagon, Universal McCann and Weber Shandwick. Leading domestic brands include Campbell-Ewald, Carmichael Lynch, Deutsch, Hill Holliday, Mullen and The Martin Agency. For more information, please visit www.interpublic.com.

About Radian6 Technologies Inc.
Radian6 provides the social media monitoring solution for PR and advertising professionals. The company’s flexible dashboard enables monitoring all forms of social media with results appearing in real-time as discovered.  Various analysis tools give users the ability to uncover the top influencers and which conversations are having an impact online.  Visit www.radian6.com for more information.

Yesterday Google announced OpenSocial, and the social media landscape changed dramatically. OpenSocial is a set of common interfaces for developers to build applications that work across (almost!) all the major social networks, like MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, and so on.

Noticeably absent from the launch day announcement is Facebook, which until yesterday had the monopoly in the world of social network applications. Over 7000 applications have been developed on Facebook in the 5 months since they announced the developer platform. Anyway you cut it, 7000 applications developed to target your 50M users is an impressive achievement.

What a difference a day makes. With the announcement of OpenSocial, Google and their launch day partners are now offering application developers a single development platform to target a user base significantly larger than Facebook. The scope of the disruption yesterday points to the red hot nature of the social media landscape. Will Facebook join OpenSocial? Likely. Are we done seeing game changing moves? Not a chance.

We’re excited to see all the creative directions that developers may take this and what the landscape will look like 9 months from now. 9 months ago was Twitter’s coming out party, and in that time it has many wondering if it and services like it are the future of communications. It certainly will be part of that future.

Where will OpenSocial take us? Hard to say, but it’s bound to be exciting and generate a lot of new ways for people to work, play and converse. And of course, we’ll be working to make sure our monitoring solution finds it’s place here.

There is more new than just Google’s OpenSocial gauntlet drop on Facebook, as a new form of social media service launched as well. Called Utterz, it allows anyone using a cell phone to call in small MediaSnacks of audio, images or text. It’s too early to tell how popular Utterz will be at this point, but it has fired up many of the social media Illuminati… always a good sign.

How do you keep up?

Radian6 is the newest member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). We see our product as a perfect companion for those firms looking to better understand the their marketplaces online, the influencers in those marketplaces, and where the topic specific conversations are popping up in real-time.

Radian6 is also sponsoring the WOMMA Summit 2007 being held at the Rio in Las Vegas on November 13th and 14th, 2007. We will be showcasing our social media monitoring solution in the exhibit area on both days between speaking sessions. We are looking forward to connecting with other WOMMA members, the conference attendees and Summit speakers.

Radian6 will be demoing its social media monitoring solution at two events in New York City. Radian6 will be at booth 2303 in the Americas Hall at this year’s ad:tech talking place at the New York Hilton November 5th and 6th. For registration information please see the ad:tech website or contact us at info@radian6.com

The company is also demoing and is sponsor at this year’s Critical Issues Forum put on by The Council of Public Relations Firms. The theme of this year’s forum is “The Consumer’s in Control: Now What?” and will be held at the Bridgewater on November 8.

We invite all those attending these events and those considering to drop by and say hello and to see the Radian6 social media monitoring solution in action.

You don’t have to spend much time in the realm of social media measurement and metrics, before you hear the term ‘Influence’ bandied about. Various methods have been devised to measure the artifacts of influence, each with their unique formulas, and each useful in their own way. Typically these influencers are presented to you as some form of leader-board or Top100 list.

But, are these lists answering the questions you have today? In the realm of PR and marketing, there are a lot of reasons to need such lists. Are you looking for those who you have to watch the closest for crisis management? Or, are you looking for those who drive the most sustainable conversations about your brand or industry? With campaign management you may want to track the response you are getting, and find the top conversations around it. Who are the individuals you should get your message to, if you want to see it spread? You might want to know what the most important pieces of social media content are today… what fires need to be put out?

The point is, a single algorithm or point of view into the dynamic world of social media is going to answer a small subset of those questions, but certainly not all of them.

And since we’re talking about social media, it is important to note that every current discussion around ranking influence and generating a list is considering only a slice of social media… blogs. Social media is much more than just blogs.

What if your question needed Twitter in the answer? Has a client asked you about Facebook and Myspace? Google bought Jaiku last week. Clearly Google thinks Jaiku is important, despite the fact that I doubt you’ve seen a Jaiku (or Twitter) microblog influencer list.

Are you wondering how video is affecting your brand? How does a list of the most influential blogs help you find the YouTube video about your brand that is currently exploding with viewers?

The great folly is thinking that any one single measure can or should answer all the questions we have. If your clients’ needs are diverse, then your requirements for measurement are diverse as well. You need the ability to observe the situation from multiple angles to truly understand the landscape. That is what we believe at Radian6.

We have built a flexible platform for surfacing important content, where you as the PR expert can impart your unique expertise and have the system automatically generate a landscape model that will help you answer the question you have today. Be it blog posts, influencers, tweets, videos, images, or whatever comes tomorrow (Lifestreams are cool, it could be whats next!), we are enabling you to get to the information you need.

Be the Social Media Expert.

It’s been an interesting few days in the world of social media measurement. While much of the focus over the last few years in online influence measures has been dedicated to link analysis in the blogosphere… some are starting to question this technique. Steve Rubel and team at Edelman have gone so far as to say, “The practice of measuring online influence by links is truly dead“.

Indeed, if your definition of the term “social media” is interchangeable with the word blogosphere, and counting links is primarily your influence calculation, then you’re missing many pieces of the puzzle.

The word ‘media’ by it’s very definition implies various forms; the ‘social media’ landscape certainly illustrates this. From social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, rich media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, traditional blogging and it’s A-listers, social voting sites like Digg and del.icio.us, to the emerging micro-blogging phenomenons like Twitter and Pounce, social media takes on a lot of forms, only some of which I’ve mentioned here. Regardless of what the service is or the form it takes, the common and recurring theme is that they are all enabling people to communicate (the media part) and engage (the social part).

Determining who is influential in the entire realm of social media can’t simply be determined by counting inbound links in the blogosphere alone. How can you measure anything great if you consider only a piece of what makes it great?

Even what makes someone influential (or, maybe what sort of influencer we are looking for) is being called into question. Duncan Watts, a researcher from Columbia University claims that how far a message will spread has less to do with how important an influencer’s listeners are (think Tipping Point), but more so, how easy those listeners are to influence and how many there are (the reach).

In other words, if we look to where the crowds are actively engaging content, we’ll likely find those elusive influencers. And sometimes, it’s not who you’d expect.

As Edelman has started to describe, any attempt at determining the influence a person holds needs to cast a net across the various channels into which that person injects their message. Further, it should be based on the same metrics that differentiate social media from simply media. Friends, votes, followers, bookmarks, downloads, favorites, engagement, views, comments, etc… oh, and links. It is these displayed ‘badges’ of honor and how they change over time that help us as individuals determine who we listen to.

This is what our customers have asked us for, and what we’re building at Radian6; it’s good to see others are seeing things as we do.

Seth Godin talks about being truly remarkable in The Big Moo and Purple Cow, “You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.”. Seth’s idea is simple and his timing is perfect. While people increasingly tune out traditional advertising, Social Technologies have completely disrupted how ideas propagate. Power has shifted.

Take little-known innovator, Yves Rossy, a former Swiss military pilot with a passion for flying. Yves is truly remarkable. You must watch his Jet-Man video. It gets posted on YouTube and, 5 months later, there are 1 million combined views of Yves Rossy videos. The result? Mr. Rossy gets noticed and has consequently picked up a corporate sponsor: Swiss watch maker Hublot. He now goes by FusionMan to match Hublot’s theme, “the art of fusion”. Congratulations, Yves!. I can’t wait to see what he will do next.