This weekend, we’re excited to announce some powerful new features and enhancements to the Radian6 platform. This new release will provide you powerful new capabilities for analysis and measurement, data filtering and segmentation, and significant new ways to track and collaborate on your community engagement.

We’ve included a snapshot of the new features below, and over the course of this week, we’ll be sharing more detail on each feature in additional posts. If you’re a Radian6 customer, you can also find helpful tutorial videos under the Help > Video Tutorials section of your dashboard, outlining the new features.

As always, if you have feedback or questions for our team about the use of the new features, please let us know. This weekend’s new release includes the following new capabilities:

As-it-happens Email and IM

Never miss a relevant post again. Now, from any analysis widget, you can create an As-It-Happens alert to have new results for that topic delivered straight to your inbox or instant messenger (IM) client at an interval you select. Each alert hyperlinks directly to the relevant post, and opens the new Conversation Sidebar (see below) and workflow capabilities in your browser so you can decide how to process the post. You can receive alerts even when you’re not working in the dashboard, so you can respond to relevant posts right from your browser window. Once you’ve acted on an alert, you and your team members will be able to see the updated activity so everyone stays in the loop and informed.

Conversation Sidebar

Within the enterprise, listening is more than a linear process. Monitoring social media means not only hearing what’s being said about your brand, but understanding what to do with that intelligence once you have it. The new Conversation Sidebar enables you to have an internal conversation with team members about the post, and also provides you enhanced workflow and tracking capabilities for each post in your topic profile so you can track responses, and share knowledge across your team. When you click the hyperlink in your As It Happens email or IM to open the sidebar, you will be able to:

•    Assign posts to team members within your organization
•    Communicate with other team members internally to collaboratively answer questions or address issues
•    Classify the type of post: lead, inquiry, compliment, complaint, etc.
•    Manually rate the sentiment of an item (positive, neutral, negative)
•    Track engagement level (commented, closed, awaiting reply) and create an audit trail of responses and outcomes

The Conversation Sidebar will help enterprise teams scale their engagement or agency teams collaborate with their clients, coordinate their community outreach, and track and analyze their external conversations.

Source Tags

Providing context for outreach and engagement in social media is key. You want to know who you’re talking to, where they’re from, how they found you. And later, you might want to segment your data by those labels. Radian6′s new source tagging capability lets you do just that.

From the workflow mode of the River of News widget, or right inside the Conversation Sidebar from your As-it-happens Email or IM, you can add tags to each source to help define their relationship with your business. Those tags will appear in every As It Happens email, IM, or post from that source, giving your team members valuable reference or context information, building and sharing valuable information for that source over time. Later, create reports, graphs, and data segmentation in your analysis widgets sorted by those tags, or even focus your listening or analysis on these tagged groups. Want to know how customers in Chicago are driving buzz for you? Drill down into posts you’ve tagged with “customer” and “Chicago” and see, instantly.

Comment Indexing

The comments on the posts you read in social media are immensely valuable. They’re often where intense discussion takes place. Conversations can evolve into new and different topics in the comments alone. Social media is a 360 degree conversation, and tracking the path of conversation across the web – including through comments – is important to your business. Radian6′s comment indexing now includes post results gathered through our new integration with the comment indexing service Backtype.com (http://www.backtype.com) as well Radian6’s new comment crawling capability.

New Metric: Total Inbound Links from Google

Radian6 has always measured on-topic inbound links to your comments. Inbound links are an important indication of influence. Now, in your River of News, Influencer Widget, and Topic Analysis Widgets, you can find data that indicates the total number of inbound links (all links), according to Google, for a particular piece of content. Inbound links can give you an idea of a post’s overall popularity as well as how often it’s being shared across the web, whether it’s in direct relation to the topic you’re tracking, or whether it’s a piece of content being referenced in another discussion altogether.

Site Traffic Statistics from Compete.com

Radian6 users can also now elect to purchase Compete.com website traffic statistics into the influencer widget view. This allows you to merge traditional web analytics (monthly site views, monthly average time on site, unique monthly visitors, monthly unique sessions) with the social media analytics captured within the Radian6 platform and better analyze the popularity, influence, and traffic for the sources relevant to you.

Powerful New Analytics & Enhanced Content Segmentation

Powerful data analysis means the ability to segment, sort, and filter data in any number of ways, to any level of granularity at a click. The Topic Analysis Widget (formerly called the Comparative Topic Monitor) now provides you with new metrics and enhanced segmenting capabilities to take your analysis to deeper levels.

Now, build your Topic Analysis widget using a selection of keywords, or choose to graph and display results from your entire topic profile. Click on your bar or pie chart (or a keyword segment) and use the menu at the top to segment those results again by language, region, media type, sentiment, engagement level, source tag, or post tag. Keep segmenting your results again by a new metric to drill down into greater and greater detail.

Your Topic Analysis results, by topic or keyword, can be counted and totalled by eight different conversation metrics including:
•    number of matching posts (volume)
•    number of total comments
•    total views for all videos/images
•    total votes for all on topic posts
•    sum of all Twitter followers
•    total on topic inbound links

•    total inbound links (off and on-topic)
•    number of unique sources

Want to know how many total comments your topic generated? Which topic generated the most Twitter impressions? Now you can see more than just post count for your topics, at a glance.

The real power in all of the new features is in their combined use. With enhanced workflow, As-It-Happens email and IM, powerful new metrics and analytics, and customized source tagging, you can create and set up a comprehensive listening grid for your enterprise to manage your entire social media outreach strategy and empower your team members to share, learn, and participate in a valuable way.

One of the characteristics that I admire most in people is initiative & proactivity – people who are always moving the yard sticks & getting things done. Be careful, however, when you ask something of @davidalston because this guy can execute faster than you can think. Seriously.

So last night we were talking about some new features we have coming out that we are quite excited about. So we say to David, “Hey, you should do something fun to drop a few hints about some features in the new Radian6 release.”

He says, “let me think about it” as he heads out the door for the evening. A couple hours later, I open my laptop to find Johnny Cache (note the spelling) singing The Social Media News!!

Does this qualify as a social media news release?

Strategic communications agency uses platform to help technology and life sciences clients tap into influential online conversations within their buying communities

Woburn, MA (PRWEB) February 17, 2009 – Lois Paul & Partners (LP&P), a leading, national strategic communications agency, has adopted Radian6 as their social media monitoring platform. LP&P uses Radian6 to listen to conversations taking place online among individuals within its clients’ buying communities. Radian6 supports LP&P’s social media services by helping clients understand what their communities are saying about them, gauge the influence of their advocates, and engage them appropriately.

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 including LinkedIn Answers, and emerging media such as FriendFeed and Twitter.

Social media and online communications are rapidly shifting best practices in PR and marketing

“As a communication partner, our clients rely on us to be an integral link between their brand and their community. It’s our job to build important, long-term relationships that drive awareness, loyalty, and business results for our clients,” explains Ted Weismann, Senior Vice President for Lois Paul & Partners. “With Radian6, we’re able to hear very clearly how our clients and their offerings are being perceived online, as well as determine what conversations are carrying the most weight across the social web. Armed with that information, we can plan and execute communications programs for clients that leverage social media and connect with customers and influencers in ways that are relevant to them.”

“Communications agencies aren’t just conduits for communication anymore. Firms like LP&P understand that they are engaged stewards for their clients’ brands, and they need to be continually aware of how the online community is shaping perception and opinion,” says Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6. “LP&P joined our Early Adopter Program because they understand the key role that online reputation management will play in today’s and tomorrow’s business environment. Listening is a key component of their strategy for clients. We provide the platform for them to guide those clients about what’s being said, who is saying it, and the smartest ways to shape their brand outreach accordingly.”

“Social media and online communications are rapidly shifting best practices in PR and marketing,” continues Weismann. “Brands are no longer simply viewed through a single, corporate lens, but through the eyes of hundreds or even thousands of people online. That groundswell is changing how customers want to be communicated with, and by using Radian6 to stay immersed in the community, we’re helping our firm and our clients adapt and evolve along with them.”

About Lois Paul & Partners

Founded in 1986, Lois Paul & Partners is a leading, national strategic communications agency that provides public relations services to emerging and established high-tech, clean energy and life sciences companies. LP&P delivers effective PR programs that help solve business problems, overcome competitive issues and capitalize on market opportunities. LP&P’s strategic, high-touch approach fosters long-term partnerships with its clients. To learn more about the exciting communication services LP&P has to offer, visit the company’s website and Beyond the Hype blog at http://www.loispaul.com.

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.

I was eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation last week with some incredibly smart media makers, including Julien Smith, Chris Brogan, Hugh McGuire and Mitch Joel.

[Pause now to go and subscribe to Mitch's podcast and other brilliances over at Six Pixels of Separation. I'll wait.]

They were discussing the future of media and how, in particular, print publication and consumption of the written word is evolving in the face of social communication. Each of them was drawing on examples from their own experience about why they felt reading, writing, and publishing was changing, and how. Do listen to the episode; some amazing insights in there.

At the end of the show, Mitch put a challenge to the crew: stop talking in terms of “I” and start looking at things outside personal perspective. There’s interesting implications in that challenge.

Personal Perspective
That’s what we have to draw from. I can only make statements and observations about things from my perspective because, well, that’s the one I have.

I can *speculate* about what it might be like to look at something from a different point of view. But I’m not sure there’s a way to completely remove the personal lens. True objectivity, by the very nature of human intelligence, is impossible.

You can do everything possible to remove or downplay bias itself, but the fact is that every observation comes from a distinct and singular point of view, regardless of how well we attempt to level that difference. You can only consider what the view might look like through someone else’s eyes. You can never experience it for yourself.

The Value in Shifting Viewpoints
What I realized is that Mitch hit on something that’s been nagging at me for years in terms of the way we were taught to communicate as brands.

We characterize our brands in the terms in which we’d like others to see us. We craft a vision, or an idealized perspective of our brand, hoping that others might be influenced or intrigued by that viewpoint. Maybe see things our way. We even give them things like taglines, or brand attributes, or magic marketing terms.

But social communication and the power that companies now hold to capture the conversations around their brands changes all of that. Brands aren’t viewed from a singular viewpoint (they really never have been), and now that brand is a composite of everything. As David Alston is fond of saying, a brand is now the sum of *all* of the conversations that take place around it. Branding isn’t myopic any longer. And that multi-faceted perspective is searchable, shareable, and visible to the world at large.

So while I still think you can’t necessarily completely immerse yourself in someone else’s perspective, there are massive amounts of information out there today that allow you to at least *observe* and absorb that perspective, in the words of the people that impact and drive your brand.

Another reason listening is so important: hearing how the community is describing you, in their own unedited words, so you can learn from their perspective. As a brand, it’s the ultimate evolution from looking from the inside out, to seeing things from the outside in. Putting the illustration of your brand in the hands of the people that know it best: the people that interact with it every day. What insights that can give.

What say you?

Image credit: S.Su

Words are powerful, aren’t they? In fact, words can act a lot like brands. When you hear a word, it conjures up an entire mental picture that is shaped, in part, by the culture and conversations around you. The meaning of certain words can also change over time as culture redefines them.

When you hear the word “listening”, what comes to mind?

Does your mental picture of “listening” look like a unidirectional & mostly observational activity or does it conjure up a picture of a two way conversation? Does listening require you to say something?

We talk a lot about the importance of a company developing the practice of listening (to the social web) for conversations about its brand. But what is listening?

In the first scenario, a company gathers online conversations about its brand, performs analysis, looks for insights, sends reports internally and perhaps makes recommendations on its findings. This certainly has value, but…

There is a better way.

Consider the goal of listening: Is it primarily informational or is it also relational?

When we think about this in the context of personal relationships between friends, do we set out to mainly gather information or do we see it as an important part of building the relationship?

Most people perceive someone who listens as someone who cares. This type of listening has to be visibly demonstrated; it is not passive or unidirectional. It is two-way listening. Message reception is not enough; the listener must respond.

It is conversational listening.

Conversational Listening Builds Relationships

One way data gathering is a stealth activity. You may be doing it to better listen to your customers and there is tremendous value in analyzing what you hear and acting upon it. Why stop there, however? Let customers see that you are listening by acknowledging them and strengthen your relationships too!

Conversational Listening Sends a Message

On the surface, listening seems to be about receiving. However, conversational listening sends a message: you are important to us.

Conversational Listening Personalizes Your Brand

A listening brand is an unmasked brand that is more personal and less institutional. As you listen & build trust, you will also increase the quality of the feedback you receive since people will share more openly when they observe true listening behavior.

Conversational Listening is Remarkable

So many customers are accustomed to dealing with brands that do not listen. The bar is so low that a responsive brand that actually takes the time to respond to customers is remarkable. It is an opportunity to delight customers.

The Power of Response

The online community’s awareness that you are actively listening will influence the conversation significantly. Your very presence changes the dynamics. Let people know you are listening.

If someone recommends your brand, say thank you. If someone asks a question, answer it publicly and you might even be answering several customers’ questions without knowing it. If someone complains, thank them for their feedback and seek to understand their experience. Ask clarifying questions. Apologize if the situation calls for it.

Then go even further and be a conversation starter. Ask open ended questions and learn. You will get to “hear” a lot more feedback when people know you are listening and that you genuinely want to hear what they have to say.

The Sixth Discipline

Remember Peter Senge’s BestSeller: The Fifth Discipline – The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization? Senge’s book focused on why the learning organization matters.

I think my book (don’t hold your breath) would focus on why the listening organization matters. The Sixth Discipline is conversational Listening – “The Art & Practice of the Listening Organization”. Besides, I have a thing for the number 6.

What do you think? In the scheme of things, how important is the listening organization? What are the issues with it?

Further reading on listening:

The Top 10 Reasons Brands Should Listen to Social Media

A Social Media Best Practice: The Value of Growing your Share of Conversation

(This is cross posted from Marcel LeBrun’s blog at www.mediaphilosopher.com)

(This is cross posted from Marcel LeBrun’s blog at www.mediaphilosopher.com)

In my previous post on social media measurement I highlighted the fact that the social web is a highly measurable medium. It is rich with metrics especially when it is compared to traditional media which produced only a few metrics to work with, like reach & frequency. In this post, I want to expand your “field of listening” and dive into a best practice that a brand can undertake: growing your Share of Conversation.

Most marketers are already familiar with the more popular measurement of share of voice. If we want to measure share of voice in social media amongst several competing brands, we would compare the number of articles, posts, tweets, videos or images where a brand and its competitors are mentioned. This would tell us which brand is mentioned the most relative to its competitors and by what margin. If we measure the competitive share of voice between Tylenol, Motrin, Advil, and Aspirin, we can see that Tylenol has the largest share of voice among its competitors. You can represent it with the chart below (pick whatever time period suits your purpose).

What is Share of Conversation?

Most companies appreciate the value and importance of monitoring direct mentions of their brand and perhaps their competitors as well. The Share of Conversation concept is about opening your field of listening to focus on a broader conversation that is very important to your brand.

Every company’s product solves a problem or meets a need. The three questions you want to ask are:

1. What are the needs or problems that your product is setting out to help with?
2. How do people discuss these needs or problems online?
3. When these problems are discussed, how prominent is your brand in these conversations?

Definition of Share of Conversation: It is the degree to which a brand is associated with the problem or need that it is setting out to help with.

If you are Tylenol, you can broaden your listening to include the entire conversation about back pain, or headaches, or arthritis. These are all significant and distinct conversations that the brand is setting out to help with. What do arthritis sufferers talk about online and how prominent is Tylenol in that conversation?

How do you measure it?

Let’s look at the overall conversation about Arthritis on the social web. It is a very active topic with well over 24,000 on-topic posts/articles published per month. When people talk about Arthritis, do they also talk about Tylenol? In this example, Tylenol’s current share of the Arthritis conversation is 1.7%.

If we do a simple overall share of voice calculation between Tylenol and Aspirin, we will observe that people talk about Tylenol almost twice as much as Aspirin. However, when it comes to the Arthritis conversation, Tylenol is not as prominent as Aspirin, which currently has a higher (2.5%) share of conversation.

Measuring share of conversation is simple. For a given time period, count the number of conversations which are on-topic for your given subject. In this example, we have just over 24,000 conversations about Arthritis. We then count the subset of these 24,000 articles which also mention Tylenol and then divide by the whole as outlined below.

The easiest way to calculate this is to use a professional social media analysis tool (disclosure: I’m the CEO of Radian6), which will quickly let you visualize the results and also enable you to automatically track it over time to measure your progress.

Why is share of conversation important?

When people go looking for solutions, they will search online. They may start with a Google search or reach out to other Arthritis sufferers amongst social networks, forums or blogs. As a brand, it is unlikely that you can dominate all the top Google listings as well as all the other sources where users will turn to find information. The social web is not about controlling information anyway, it is about participation. With 24,000 on-topic arthritis conversations, the probability that they will land on your site in their search for answers is quite low. So you want to strive to have your brand associated with the conversation wherever they do land.

Advertisers know the power of repetition (even though consumers typically don’t “trust” ads). When I hear something mentioned once I might dismiss it, but when I hear it repeatedly, particularly from trusted sources, I start to think there might be something to it.

If Tylenol can successfully add value and become an insider to the Arthritis conversation, then it will have achieved much more value than any one-way message or ad campaign can achieve. The key is trust. Arthritis sufferers will trust each other far more than they will trust any corporate message, particularly an ad. If Tylenol can earn the trust of the community and grow its share of conversation, it will have achieved a valuable and difficult to replicate position.

How to grow your share of conversation?

Start by listening to the conversation. We already know that Tylenol is only associated with ~1.7% of the arthritis conversation, so we know arthritis sufferers are talking about something else. What are the hot sub-topics within the conversation? What are people buzzing about? This discipline of listening must become an ongoing process since conversations are constantly changing, in real time.

The next step is to begin participating in the conversation. Consider where your company or brand can add real value to the specific topics that are important to the community (based on your listening above). Ask questions and seek first to understand. Then, contribute helpful content. This could be a white paper, e-book, blog post, or video which addresses questions that are frequently discussed. Listen for expressions of needs or causes that your content is designed to help with and reach out when appropriate. Ask questions designed to better understand the community’s needs and deepen your learning about arthritis sufferers. Through your participation, you will convey and demonstrate your brand’s passion for the problem and your willingness to invest in helping them.

As you participate, your brand association with the topic will grow and you will become a trusted insider in the community. A brand that personally engages and participates becomes less institutional and more human – an “unmasked brand” which is easier to know & trust.

Where to start and ROI

It is easy to to have a significant impact even if you want to start small. What if we started with an initial investment of a few hours per day for one person (and a professional listening tool, of course, so that the person’s time is spent in conversation and not in the administrative tasks of searching, reporting, etc.).

As a first step, we will narrow the broader arthritis conversation to focus on the 250 most influential sites. For this topic, the top 250 sites generated approximately 3,000 conversations (and 11,000 comments) about arthritis in the past month which is ~100 day – a relatively manageable volume for one person to tackle part time. Our resource would first focus on these conversations, taking the actions I described above (listening, learning, adding value, participating, etc.).

How much visibility would this get? These top on-topic sites collectively had 78.8 million unique visitors last month and close to 1 billion page views so that is a lot of overall exposure. To come up with an ad-equivalency benchmark, I used JP Morgan’s average CPM forecast for 2008 of $3.44 to calculate that a “theoretical” banner ad campaign on these sites would cost up to $3.4 million (if you wanted to cover every visit to every page/post). Many of the ad exposures would be wasted since only a percentage of the total conversation on these sites is on topic. Your direct conversational engagement efforts, however, are always 100% on topic so none of your investment is wasted. Plus, the value of direct engagement in the conversation is much higher and longer lasting than any ad impression.

An ad campaign is fleeting. If you want to generate the same exposure next month you have to buy it all over again. Investing in becoming an insider to an online community and generating positive word of mouth builds up and accumulates over time. It is conversation capital. It is an investment that pays dividends for months to come.

What do you think?

Does this make sense? Was this helpful? Would you like to try this for your brand?