Well, based on the comments after the final Twebinar on the subject of “Listening” it looks like everyone enjoyed it and would like to see more.  With over 1400 tweets before, during and after the event we hit a new record for the series.  We’ve already had a number of great posts summarizing the event which you can find here.  As well, if you happened to miss the action you can catch a recording of the live and prerecorded interviews here (unfortunately we had a few audio drops during the Twebinar and they were also captured during the recording so we apologize for that. )

We certainly are glad so many participants and speakers in this series received a lot of value from it.  Not only did the format deliver wonderful insights from our recorded and live speakers but it gave participants the chance to pickup and find followers with similar interests while offering the ability to continue the discussion after each event.

A big thank you goes out to our host Chris Brogan, CrossTech Media, our 30+ recorded and live social media experts, SNCR, WOMMA, all those who spread the word about the events and those who reviewed them, as well as the thousands of participants.

As for future Radian6 Twebinars, we certainly will be looking at that possibility in the new year.  As for the twebinar format, we’ve already seen a number of others adopting the format which is very encouraging.

Thanks again to all.

Cold calling has been served notice, a new era beckons and with it an altogether different way of working. Social networking has arrived and will soon replace cold calling as the predominant method of prospecting in business.

I have profoundly changed the way I do business and have firmly embraced social media and the networking possibilities it has created. To that end I have reduced to a very small percentage the amount of time I spend cold calling. (more…)

With the ease of use of Web 2.0 social media sites consumers are now publishers and broadcasters.  They have the ability to share their opinions, needs, complaints, and ideas in a way that is not only immediate but permanently recorded and easily spread.  Consumers are no longer whispering amongst themselves.  They are shouting from the tops of mountains.  They are shouting out to brands.

But are their favorite brands listening to them?  And if they are listening are they then engaging in such a way that:

-    maintains or grows that brand’s reputation,
-    improves a customer’s experience,
-    helps someone learn more about a product,
-    solves a problem,
-    positions properly against a competitor
-    delivers valued content
-    enables and/or thanks a fan
-    encourages participation in that brands future success

But is the act of listening and engaging, in general, good enough?  It’s certainly a great start.  But the act of embracing the social web in this way begins to create a whole new set of challenges.

For a moment, imagine way back in history when businesses got their first phone.  Customers could call them to place orders but they could also call to complain, get help, give feedback etc…  So, naturally, departments within companies got phones as well to answer these different types of calls and used a new feature to transfer calls between them.  This worked so well that these companies began to grow and with growth came the need to add more phones and more staff.  And with more staff meant the need to assign calls to the right people within departments based on skill, availability, language, territory etc…  It also meant an increased load at times and a challenge to ensure calls were answered quick enough to maintain or increase client satisfaction.  And so it goes. It’s the sophisticated contact centers of today that show us where it can all end up.

Brands listening to and engaging with the social web, or what we like to call, answering the “social phone”, quickly face the same challenges.  They are expected to:

-    answer or engage quickly because commenting activity usually happens in the first 24-48 hours
-    operate in multiple languages and filter content by region so issues and opportunities can be addressed locally
-    cover all types of social media be it blogs, forums and opinion sites, picture and video sharing sites, online mainstream news and emerging media like Twitter and Friendfeed
-    prioritize by what’s going viral or who’s the most influential in order to be the most effective and efficient
-    analyze trends in order to help calculate ROI

So keeping all this in mind, we find it particularly exciting when we get to work with a company that believes in listening and engaging with their community, that shares our vision as to where this is all headed, and that wants to see this become a natural part of any company’s mix of valuable customer channels.

One such company we are excited to be working with is Dell.  And it’s through their use of our social media monitoring and engagement platform today that’s helping to generate wonderful feedback as to where to go next (See Dell’s blog post: “Dell and Radian6 – It all starts with listening.” )   Assignment of tasks amongst a workgroup and the ability to track and audit engagements are just a few of these key features.

Conversations about thousands of brands are happening every minute of every day.  People are expressing needs, sharing opinions, sharing ideas – hoping to be heard and in many cases, hoping to connect.  Dell has decided to be part of the conversation, to assist and to share – and we are proud to be partners in helping make it happen.

What about your company?  Can you hear the shouts?  And remember – “everyone loves a good listener.”

The final Twebinar of the Social Media Summer Series with Chris Brogan is set to go Tuesday, August 19 at 2pm EDT.

In step with the previous two Twebinars we’ve listened to feedback and are tweaking the format yet again.   In addition to the previously recorded interviews with 30+ of today’s social media experts we’ll be adding three live guests.  Kami Watson Huyse from MyPRPro.com and Todd Defren from SHIFT Communications will join host, Chris Brogan, and Radian6 CEO, Marcel LeBrun via remote video to share their thoughts on “The Importance of Listening” with respect to brands and social media.

We’ll be looking to take more questions via Twitter and aiming to sum things up at the end with a few key takeaways to keep that discussion going online.  We are also implementing a few new enhancements regarding the video experience to make it run smoother.

We’ve had some record crowds participating in the last two events and this one is shaping up to be a similar extravaganza.   So limber up those tweeting fingers, grab a speed drink of your choice and get ready for another full-on, Twebinar experience.

When we publicly launched the Radian6 platform only 10 months ago it was after following an interactive process where our future customers told us exactly what they needed to monitor and analyze in social media.  This was our EAP or early adopter program and we grateful to those early pioneers for using our solution and for all of the insight and feedback they sent our way.

Photo – Marcel Lebrun, CEO of Radian6

Well, the tradition of listening has continued on.  With each month of feedback we’ve continued to roll out new features.  The list has grown to the point that it’s probably time to get back in to that website of ours and add whole new sections of copy, screenshots etc…  But in the meantime I thought it might be useful if we listed a few of these new key capabilities.

Even Greater Coverage – Our customers absolutely rely on us to pull in the broadest sweep of social media.  In addition to already covering blogs, forums, online news, and opinion sites, we’ve bumped up our microblogging coverage with Twitter and Friendfeed and cast the widest net possible for online video through our partnership with blinkx.

Global Support – We’ve expanded the abilities of the platform to make it easy for global firms to target listening towards specific regions or specific languages.  We do this with two types of filtering – by region and by language.

• Regional filters – Now focus in on one or more countries rather than the world as a whole.  Global brands usually have different groups handling different regions of the world so this feature really helps them isolate the monitoring and analysis to results that interest them the most.

• Language filters – we now support a number of major European and Asian languages.  English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Japanese and simple Chinese filters can be set up to further focus monitoring and analysis efforts.

Additional Filters – We’ve also added addtional ways to filter results either at the topic profile level or the analysis widget level.

• Media type filters – users can sub-divide or isolate results by either blogs, videos, images, online news, micromedia (ie. Twitter and Friendfeed) and/or forums.  This provides a great way to separate user-generated content from mainstream publications for example.

• Source filters – Only need to monitor certain sites vs. the entire social web?  Setting up a specific list of sources allows a user to get a finite set of content and still use all of the dashboards analysis widgets for analysis.

Email Alerts

Email alerts are now available for users traveling on the road or needing a full snapshot of results on a daily basis.  Alerts are completely hyperlinked so monitoring can be quickly browsed in a single email message with outreach  possible using any mobile device with web browsing abilities.

Influencer Discovery

This widget enables uncovering of the most influential sites within a specific topic as defined by the user.  The formula, which is open and user configurable, uses viral metrics captured and constantly updated by the platform with each post/tweet/video/picture found.  The collection of these conversational dynamics along with a user defined formula continue to make our solution unique.

Additional Viral Metrics

Along with the orginal metrics captured with each post/tweet/video/picture which include comments, unique commenters, and views, we’ve also added in-bound on-topic links and votes (Delicio.us linking).  While these metrics feed our influence widget they also enable users to sort through the literally thousands of posts coming in, help them discover those with the most engagement or the potential to go viral.

User-interface Enhancements

Radian6 has become known for it’s unique flash-based user interface users say takes the complex and makes it simple.  We’ve added new flexibility within the dashboard including the ability to pick date ranges for results (in addition to preset ranges) and to access longer historical data sets.

For those users with the need for a large number of analysis widgets or with multiple projects/clients to manage, we’ve also added multi-dashboards, or the ability to set up multiple windows.  In essence, users now have eight times the screen real estate to customize their widgets.

Users also have a number of ways to export results and analysis from the dashboard.  New high resolution images can be exported for client reports via direct
download or email.  And we’ve increased the number of export formats from HTML and XML to include PDF and CSV.

And there is more yet to come.  We continue to look ahead to new unique features in partnership with our customers so please keep that feedback coming.

This is yet another example of how videos on YouTube or other video sharing site can become very viral.  The person in this interview is Steve McClaren, ‘X’ England football manager.  It must be stressed that Steve is English but now in charge of a Dutch club.

The video has become viral because of the very strange accent he is using.  The video has been posted numerous times on different sites and is currently standing at around 1million views.  Notice of the video has been monitored on countless blogs and forums and was widely circulated on Twitter.

Enjoy!

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Twitter is a great platform, if only it would work all of the time.  Like many we have become frustrated at seeing the whale, loosing contacts, loosing SMS updates (if you are in the UK) and more.

SO…..

Whilst waiting for Twitter to work today I decided to update the Whale Picture!

6Consulting also blog at www.sociallyminded.co.uk

(Republished from a guest post David Alston, Radian6′s VP Marketing, did on the TopRank Online Marketing Blog on May 8, 2008)

Social media has simplified the art of the soapbox shout. Information is shared with the masses now using easy-to-use Web 2.0 tools and is recorded and cached for infinity. A shout out loud in social media has no geographic boundaries and is not time-limited. These two points make the non-stop monitoring of social media an important to-do for any brand owner. And monitoring social media does not just mean blogs. It should include video and image sharing sites and microblogging sites like Twitter, along with opinion and discussion forums.

As a provider of the tools for monitoring hundreds and even thousands of well known brands online, we’ve found a multitude of reasons for paying attention to what’s being said in social media. Here are the top ten:

The complaint – Watch for posts complaining about your products or services, company, and staff. Catching something early means getting a chance to show how responsive you are. A complaint is an opportunity to demonstrate problem-solving abilities. A posted complaint may also draw out other comments from people with the same concern, which provides an opportunity to reach out to them as well. And who knows, impressing customer with great customer service may generate some positive posts about how you resolved the problems.

The compliment – Compliments can come in many forms. It could be a congratulations message about a recent award. It could be a customer raving about the experience they just had with a product or with customer service. Social media compliments are the online equivalent of those old school references or testimonials of days past. Create a delicio.us account or use another social bookmarking utility and save all of these compliments in a list for future use. Potential clients looking for reassurance on a purchase decision would love to see what others think of your company and products.

The expressed need – The best way to watch for expressed needs is to look for keywords often used to describe those needs. People shout out what they are doing and ask the general public for advice occasionally when they are about to make a purchase. Both of these situations provide an opportunity to reach out with an offer of assistance or a free demo for example. While this may seem intrusive at first glance consider that great retail clerk who offers to help when you are trying to locate a pair of shoes in your size. A social media poster often appreciates that someone is listening and does not mind an offer of assistance especially if it’s done in a helpful way.

The competitor – If you are watching your industry and relevant keywords, you will probably be the first to know when a new competitor appears on the scene or when their name is mentioned. This kind of Intelligence can highlight opportunities to reach out to potential customers who are trying out a competitor or dissatisfied with a competitor’s product or service. You may also discover which industry players are advocates for competitive brands, giving you the opportunity to reach out and gauge their interest in your capabilities. Competitors will also often talk about subjects they are strategically interested in. Being able to stay on top of those discussions allows you to anticipate future moves.

The crowd – Topics will often pop up online that draw huge crowds from a page visits or commenting perspective. There is a lot to be learned in discussion threads especially when they have the potential to affect your brand. Following the swarms can give you a better understanding of current sentiment and thinking towards a certain topic and who the players are that have opinions on it. It also may point out a topic that you will need to monitor going forward. Tracking a topic’s viral nature and how long it lives can give you an idea of its relative importance. You may also decide to participate in the crowd discussion thread early in the process, giving your company exposure to those currently involved in the discussion and to those yet to join.

The influencer – Influencers within a space can carry a lot of weight. They gain there power either from the number of times they post on a topic, the number of people who link to their posts on a topic, the number of people gathering to comment and how engaged visitors to their posts become. The hive that forms around an influencer helps spread an opinion on a brand faster and that opinion express potentially carries more weight. Often an influencer’s post appears prominently in a topic’s Google search results thus affecting the views of even more potential customers. Knowing who these influencers are and their opinions of your brands helps you determine who to reach out to for help as advocates or to understand why they currently hold a negative view.

The crisis – Discussions happening in social media can serve as an early warning system before an issue goes mainstream. By using advanced tools you can observe new words popping more frequently about your brands. If you were an airline, as an example, the sudden appearance of the word “cancellation” along with the words “bad” and “customer service” would immediate trigger a need to drill into the posts driving them. Tracking these “crisis” words over time on a go forward basis would also then help gauge the effectiveness of any outreach campaigns to address the underlying issues.

The ROI – There has been a lot of buzz lately on how to successful measure online marketing and outreach campaigns. Much of the focus has centered on the topic of engagement. While a universal engagement metric has yet to be agreed upon there are still a number of effective ways to measure engagement and ROI in general. Track the mentions of a brand in user-generated content before, during and after a campaign. Isolate positive words associated with a particular brand and gauge the number of times they were used over a period of time. Alternatively, you could sort all posts mentioning a particular brand or topic by number of comments or views to uncover the top 50 discussions where potentially engagement was the highest.

The audit – A brand is the sum of all conversations and is no longer completely controlled by the corporation. By analyzing social media a corporation or agency can score a brand’s overall user sentiment, determine which words are commonly associated with it, understand which competitors rank closest in buzz or online mentions, uncover which sites are advocates, and rank which social media channels contain more discussion versus others. By isolating which sites are discussing your brand or a competitor’s brand, an audit can also help pinpoint possible ad placement opportunities for reaching the most valuable and engaged audiences.

The thread – With so many social media channels to shout out on, conversations often become splintered. A discussion can start within one channel and quick leap into another making it rather difficult to follow. Following discussions using keywords associated with it can help bridge the thread across all types of social media. This thread would then appear as a connected conversation for easy analysis.

Customers, prospects and peers are discussing your brand, your industry and your competitors right now in social media: with or without you. Unfortunately, choosing not to listen doesn’t make those conversations go away. Actively listening means protecting brand reputation, discovering opportunities, staying competititive and avoiding runaway crisis’.