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?