So it’s been a week and time to reflect on what we learned from unleashing the #twittersecret upon the masses last Friday.

In no particular order:

People like to keep a secret a secret – yes, we were very surprised to see how long the secret stayed a secret. For about 1.5 hours no one spilled the beans and even when it finally came out that person apologized to me for it – which was very admirable.

The photocopy effect – I suppose this only makes sense when you think about how a whispered secret can change with each new generation. Yes, in one direction it became a Rickroll. Another, it became people making up funny stories about what #twittersecret could be (good Friday afternoon fun . But most surprising of all, half the secret vanished by the 2nd or 3rd generation. Which leads me to…

It was 920 characters not 255 characters – The DM that was originally sent was actually around 920 characters long and that was the real BIG secret. We purposely wrote it though to clip perfectly at 255 (because that’s all that would appear in the sent messages window on Twitter.) But if you had email notification turned on, which we do, you got the entire 920 character message. It would appear that either people don’t have this feature turned on or that they focused on the 255 embedded message and spread that. Either way, the 920 character limit part of the secret never broke online…until now.

And finally,

The completely unexpected outcomes – Yes, there were a few. Those with delivery to text messages got bombarded with up to 7 texts in a row with the 920 character DM because Twitter chopped it up to deliver it. And there was also lots of debate as to whether anyone really wanted to have messages longer that 140 characters because succinct essence of Twitter was what they truly cherished.

As far as some marketing learnings go what started as only with a couple of tweets spread like wildfire in little over 2 hours to generate over 650 retweets and continued on into the weekend. The keys to the success of the spread was that, while the the ask “I know the #twittersecret – DM me to find out” tweets were generic the message was shared amongst trusted networks AND the information was valuable, relevant and even remarkable to the many who received and retweeted it.

What other lessons can be gleaned by this upon retrospect?

Non-profit will use social media to educate parents and volunteers, improve the health of babies

White Plains, NY (PRWEB) December 8, 2008 – The national non-profit organization March of Dimes, in conjunction with the public relations professionals at Barkley, has selected Radian6 as their social media vendor. March of Dimes will use the platform to find and take part in online conversations revolving around pregnancy related topics.

Across the online space, the nature of the conversations and questions can be posted in a multitude of social media formats or channels. Trying to manually search for these conversations on a regular basis can prove daunting for many organizations. The Radian6 social media monitoring platform helps automate the collection of these conversation points and tracks viral and influence metrics to assist with sorting and prioritization.

The social Web provides us with great opportunity to help our community find the resources and information they need. By monitoring with Radian6, we can pinpoint conversations revolving around relevant issues, engage people, and direct them to educational material.

“The March of Dimes works to give all babies a fighting chance against threats to their health. Our community is passionate and involved, so it’s incredibly important for them to have as many channels as possible to connect with us and our work,” said Patty Goldman, vice president and chief marketing officer for March of Dimes. “The social Web provides us with great opportunity to help our community find the resources and information they need. By monitoring with Radian6, we can pinpoint conversations revolving around relevant issues, engage people, and direct them to educational material.”

Radian6′s social media monitoring platform gathers real-time-as-discovered information from across the social Web, including blogs, video sharing sites, boards and forums like LinkedIn Answers, and emerging media such as FriendFeed and Twitter.

“Community engagement is the lifeblood of any non-profit organization, and the Web is transforming how these groups can fulfill their missions,” says Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6. “The breadth and depth of coverage from the Radian6 platform allows these groups to listen carefully at the point of need for their community, wherever they may be and in real time. By proactively engaging online, organizations like March of Dimes can carry their message and mission directly into the community and connect with people when they’re most needed.”

“In addition to providing an invaluable conduit to parents, volunteers, and donors, listening to conversations with Radian6 gives March of Dimes insight into how much impact they’re having in their communities,” adds Jeff Risley, vice president of public relations and social media analyst at Barkley. “We’re able to track the issues that have a direct effect on the well-being of babies, and understand how and where we should be focusing our resources to make the biggest difference. Seeing March of Dimes’ mission through the eyes of those that need them most is critical to our success.”

About March of Dimes

March of Dimes is the leading organization for pregnancy and baby health. With chapters nationwide and its premier event, March for Babies®, March of Dimes works to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality. For the latest resources and information, visit www.marchofdimes.com or www.nacersano.org, for information in Spanish.

About Radian6 Technologies

Radian6 provides the social media monitoring platform for marketing, communications and customer support professionals. The company’s flexible dashboard enables monitoring all forms of social media with results appearing in real-time as discovered. Various analysis widgets give users the ability to uncover the top influencers as well as which conversations are having an impact online. Visit www.radian6.com for more information.

To all of our Valued Customers and Partners,

First of all, I want to say thank you for using Radian6 and that we appreciate your business. We are also continuously amazed at the support we receive from our customers in creating positive word of mouth about our product and company. We greatly appreciate all the support. Thank you.

Based on your suggestions and feedback, we have some exciting new features to tell you about. They were added to the system this past weekend. Please keep the requests coming.

Infinite Data Retention & Expanded Historical Results
Customers now have infinite data retention in their active topic profiles. All results for all your active topic profile are stored forever and you will always be able to immediately access & analyze results back to the date when you first setup your topics in Radian6. This will enable convenient quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year comparisons in the dashboard as well as help you find old content or analyze a campaign from 2 years past, for example.

While your active topic profile stores results forever, the situation may arise where you have an immediate need to analyze historical results for a new topic that you were not previously monitoring. Radian6 now offers an option for you to access an additional 7 months of historical data, immediately upon creation of your new topic. Please contact your Radian6 account executive or customer support for details.

Online Engagement Workflow Management Capabilities
Coordinating, tracking and measuring your team’s online outreach efforts can be a challenge, especially if you engage in real-time. Radian6’s new workflow management feature enables a smooth and efficient, team-based approach to listening and responding online. With this new set of feature you can assign tasks to team members , leave notes (ex: “Do you know him? Please comment on this post”), manage your personal task list, keep track of your team’s commenting activity, run activity and audit trail reports, and more. You can also classify types of conversations (i.e. service complaints, product compliments/recommendation, product inquiry, etc) and measure the results of your outreach efforts. To access this set of features, simply click on the “Workflow” button on the bottom left-hand corner of the River of News widget.

Automated Dashboard Level Reporting
Customers will continue to enjoy the current flexible approach to exporting content, chart images & data from the widgets, but we have also added a fully automated dashboard level report. With the Automated Dashboard Reports feature, you can build your own “canned” multi-part reports which enable you to include multiple widgets from your dashboard, provide heading and narrative text for each and have the updated report automatically distributed to up to 50 email addresses at up to two specific times per day. You can create as many reports as you want on each of your eight dashboards. To create your first report, simply click on the pie chart icon in the dashboard toolbar at the top of your R6 dashboard.

New Share-of-Voice Charting
The New Comparative Topic Monitor can compare conversation volume in either the current bar chart visualization or a new Pie Chart option by clicking the “Pie” button on the lower left corner, enabling quick and easy share-of-conversation views between your brands and/or your competitors.

Customer Branding for Agencies
For qualified Agency partners, the Radian6 Dashboard can now be custom branded with your Agency’s logo and colours. Please contact the Radian6 team if you are interested in exploring this option.

Enhanced Content APIs – Third Party Integration
Have unique project in mind? Radian6’s flexible API brings the power of the Radian6 platform to your enterprise. For example, we recently enabled a large enterprise customer to build a new internal site to which provides active conversations for specific on-topic content, in real-time, to be accessed by employees company-wide. The Radian6 API was used to integrate relevant conversations from the customer’s topic profile into their internal community platform.

Twitter Content is Also Real-Time
Conversations on twitter are fast moving. We pride ourselves in having the fastest content discovery engine and broadest media coverage in the industry so you can listen and respond to conversations as they are happening. Our special twitter feed is now also the fastest in the industry.

Widget Analysis Window Extended
We also extended the time period that can be analyzed in a single widget to any three month window (90 days). You can select a real-time window or pick any specific date range (up to 3 months) all the way back to when you first created your topic profile. Of course, you can always set up multiple widgets in the same dashboard to view larger data windows. Comparing quarter over quarter data is now quite easy.

Social Profiles
Sometimes it takes a lot of clicking to see the full social profile of an author who is writing about your brand. You might want to read their blog, see if they have multiple blogs, follow them on twitter, connect on linkedin, see their Youtube account, and understand which social networks they participate in. Now with a single click in the River of News or Influencer Widget you can instantly open a person’s known connected social profiles saving you valuable time and providing a complete picture of their social profile.

Source Filter Enhancements
Radian6 provides many ways to filter content. Source profiles enable you to focus your analysis on a specific set of sources or even exclude a specific set of sources from your analysis. This latest enhancement adds an “include all” capability where you might want to analyze conversations in a specific community regardless of topic. Some customers are using this to measure conversations in their own customer communities, for example.

Advanced Widget Drill Down
To find actionable insights, you need to be able to go from the big picture and then to drill down into the data with maximum flexibility. Now, you can instantly drill down from one widget type to another and hone in on specific trends or conversation. For example, you might notice a spike in conversation in one of your keywords, but you don’t want to read all the posts to see what is driving it. Instead you can launch a Conversation Cloud which specifically analyzes that spike in conversation. From this cloud, you might want to further focus on a specific topic that you see emerging by drilling deeper with more focused conversation clouds, times series trends, and of course open the specific posts driving the conversation. Once you have focused in on a targeted conversation or sub-topic that you want to keep tabs on, you can easily include any of these widgets in the new automated reports described above.

As always, If you would like to review any of these features in more detail, need any assistance with setting up topic profiles, widgets and/or exporting reports please call us and we will do whatever we can to assist you – just let us know what you need!

Your Radian6 Team