On my recent post about Being a Director of Community, one question came up prominently in the comments and feedback on Twitter:

So, how exactly do you quantify and justify what you do each day?

Aha. We want proof do we? Proof that all the things I do on a daily basis are moving needles somehow?

I’m going to answer in two parts. I’m going to answer in the practical sense and give you some true, tangible benchmarks. But please pay close attention to the conclusions that aren’t so concrete, because I think they matter a lot.

Measuring the Impact: Hard Metrics

Given all of the communicating I do on a daily basis, there are a few things that are most certainly – and at least partially – influenced  by my activities across the web. I use Radian6 to track and quantify the workflow of all of my engagement on sites like blogs and Twitter, and combined with my offline work, we can map some of that activity to:

• Increased traffic, subscribers, and engagement for our website and blog
• Increased numbers of leads coming through online channels (and I can certainly track the ones that come through me directly)
• Leads from in-person events like conferences and seminars
• More positive word-of-mouth and awareness for our brand and company overall
• An increased proportion of positive sentiment in mentions of our brand
• An increase in mentions of our company in the media, both online and traditional (Share of Conversation)
• More engaged conversations on our corporate Twitter account

I’d also wager that having a community presence can help tie back to many of the metrics listed back on this post, some of which will be more directly attributable than others, and many of which are greatly affected by the fact that we have an engaged team of people that interacts in the community (not just me by any means). For us, it’s woven into our culture, and I think that’s part of what’s going to eventually separate the businesses that succeed with social media from the ones that will always struggle to make it work.

One thing to note: the most effective way to measure the impact of something specific is to benchmark beforehand. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s really hard to measure something over time without a starting point, and many folks flounder to find meaning in their stats because they never knew where they started from. Do the best you can to quantify where you are NOW on a few solid points. Track everything you can related to those points, and measure those same elements again later. Resist the urge to overcomplicate.

Anecdotal Counts, Too

There’s also a “smoosh” factor to all of this work, which means that some of the positive impact of having a community presence is intangible. It’s the equivalent of the business development and customer cultivation we’ve done for years. Think dinner with clients, rounds of golf, customer appreciation events.

We don’t do these things because they themselves have an immediate impact on the bottom line, we do them because we know they positively influence and contribute to relationship building, and in some cases, it’s just the grateful and human thing to do. It’s about working to increase the likelihood that your business is the one people choose.

So, part of qualifying the value of my work is in hearing, first hand, that someone reached out to learn more about us because they knew and trusted me on a personal level. That something on our blog prompted them to learn more about us, or to explore better ways to get involved and immersed in social media. That they learned something from a case study we developed, or that they had a great experience with our customer support team.

These days, we call a lot of this “social proof” and some of it you can capture (you can check out Radian6’s Twitter favorites for some of our anecdotal proof of the nice things people say about us, which is one way we track it). Some of it is more elusive, an overall association people draw between your company, your people, and the quality of their experiences with you. There’s no singlar metric that measures that.

So, when it comes down to it, are you capable of trusting a little bit of one of the oldest ideas? That taking good care of people is good for business, and ultimately what keeps them coming back?

Photo credit: juhansonin

I often get asked what my job entails. Community roles are still a bit on the new side,  and I’d wager that other people in similar roles have differences in their responsibilities (and I’d love to hear from you guys here).

So here, I’ll try to capture a bit about my responsibilities and goal and the challenges of a role like this. In a future post, I’ll talk a bit about what I think it takes to do it well, should you be interested in a similar position yourself. Cool? There’s a lot of information here, but hopefully it’ll help answer some questions.

The Gig:

As a community director, I see my role as a bit of a blend: part business development, part client services, part communications (like marketing and PR all smashed together). In short, my job is to stay connected and engaged with the Radian6 community, which means our customers, potential customers, fans, and those that have an interest in what we’re doing as a company.

On a day to day basis, I’m often doing these sorts of things:

Listening for mentions of our brand across the web (yep, using Radian6 of course), and when appropriate,  engaging the people and discussions. For the most part, that’s blogs and Twitter for us, but occasionally a forum or other social network becomes an important place to chat.

The goal: Building a strong network of relationships across the web based on trust, familiarity, and professional insight.

Acting as a liaison for our customers on the front lines of communication across the web. It’s related to above, but sometimes I’m not the best person to answer a question, so I can help act as a conduit to our internal team members and make sure our customers are supported at each point in their relationship across our company. I’m both ambassador for our brand, and advocate for our customers.

The goal: Streamline communication between our customers online, and our backstage teams at Radian6.

Writing for the Radian6 blog, focusing on topics that are relevant to our corporate and agency clients, and the social media space as a whole.

The goal: Sharing thoughts, best practices, and generating discussion about topics that are important to people working in social communications.

Framing out and executing a community strategy to empower and engage our customers, both with us and among themselves . This is community building at its core, including supporting user groups, creating online destinations, sharing best practices, and connecting people within existing communities.

The goal: To make being a Radian6 customer a truly valuable experience. We want to create a network among our customers, get to know them as people, and tap the insights of our users to continually improve our platform and our role as thought leaders.

Internal education with our business development and other team members to discuss the web 2.0/social media landscape and how it works, as well as trends and issues that are cropping up among our own community.

The Goal: Helping everyone inside the company understand and feel comfortable with how social media and community outreach relates to their job, as well as carry feedback from the community back to our team. Lucky for me, it’s easy in my company.

Contributing to all of our content marketing efforts, and including media creation and community outreach efforts. That can include press releases, online content, podcasts, case studies, you name it. And we work hard to listen to what people are asking for, rather than what we think they need.

The Goal: Be a source of information to the community at large about our industry best practices, what we’re up to, and what we’re planning next.

Participating in the communities we cultivate. I can’t stress this one enough. My job is not only to listen to the community, but I need to be an active and engaged participant myself. Otherwise, what kind of credibility do I have? This also entails my getting on lots of airplanes to go to events where our customers and prospects are. Being available and accessible offline and face to face is important, too.

The Goal: Lots of connections and relationship building, both online and off.

The Challenges:

Being in this kind of role isn’t a clock-punching kind of job. I’m hyper-connected, and I actually thrive on that kind of pace. But it certainly isn’t for everyone, and being incredibly connected to a community means that you’re never entirely “off duty”. It’s a perk and a challenge at the same time. Being trusted is immensely gratifying, but it also means that you have increasing responsibilities to the people that count on you.

Scaling can be hard. The trick is in empowering your colleagues to be engaged in the community, too. You’ve got to integrate listening and engagement practices into as many aspects of the business as you can, and that often means internal education for others so they can feel comfortable being part of that ecosystem. For companies not in the social space, this can take more time and effort, but it’s the key to being able to truly scale social media efforts. Social media isn’t strictly for communications types.

Balancing personal and professional interactions. For instance, if someone’s talking about my company on Twitter, following them is a natural progression. But if they’re talking about my competitor? Some might see my connection as intrusive. It’s always a delicate balance to read the pulse of any given community and gauge your interactions appropriately. There’s no perfect answer, because we’re dealing with human beings here, and everyone’s experience and expectations are unique.

Negativity happens. It takes a certain amount of temperance to properly address critiques and complaints while understanding when negativity is happening just for the sake of it. Above all, it’s about remembering that most people simply want to be heard and acknowledged, and taking negativity as a catalyst for good conversation, either internally or externally.

Keeping a workflow. Communities don’t keep schedules, nor do they stick to routines. It can be a challenge to balance ongoing, strategic projects with the need to be available, connected, and responsive to the community when they need you, or when the situation warrants.  It takes a bit of discipline and a high level of organization to keep projects moving forward while taking the time to engage and communicate effectively and in a timely manner.
What I’ll say about all of this? This job was made for me. For a person who’s always been plugged into what’s *right* about communicating with customers but balked at what felt contrived in marketing, being in a community role is the kind of job that I’ve always sought. Challenges aside, every interaction and connection is well worth it, and each day brings me new insights and the validation that social communications really are on the right track.

So that’s the lowdown, at a high level. Is this what you expected? Are you in a similar role but doing different things? I’d love to hear your feedback and help answer any other questions you might have. Let’s chat in the comments?

This post was cross-posted on Altitude Branding

Lifestyle retailer will use the platform to track trends and engage their customers online.

Anaheim, Calif. (March 23, 2009) – Pacific Sunwear, a leading lifestyle specialty retailer rooted in youth culture with 932 stores nationwide, has rolled out the Radian6 social media monitoring platform to track trends and better respond to customers in the online space.

Radian6’s social media monitoring platform gathers real-time-as-discovered information from across the social web for PacSun, including from blogs, video sharing sites, boards and forums, and from emerging media such as FriendFeed and Twitter.

“Radian6 gives us the ability to hear the active discussion regarding PacSun that happens outside of our stores and in the online space,” said Pacific Sunwear’s Social Media Manager Denise Garciano.  “With that knowledge, we can build our brand by responding quickly to create better experiences for our customers both in social media and right in our stores.”
Since the Radian6 software allows PacSun to focus its analysis on a specific set of sites or sources on the web, it allows the company to achieve targeted, relevant results.
“The social web is a key source of customer research and insight for companies, said Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun.  Our platform brings brands real-time feedback and comments from their community as it’s discovered across the web so they can be present and engaged right when their customers need them. Users can respond to customers immediately, then watch the impact of that outreach to understand how it’s moving their business forward.”

About Pacific Sunwear of California, Inc.
Pacific Sunwear is a leading lifestyle specialty retailer rooted in the youth culture and fashion vibe of Southern California. The Company sells casual apparel with a limited selection of accessories and footwear designed to meet the needs of teens and young adults. As of January 31, 2009, the Company operated 806 PacSun stores and 126 PacSun Outlet stores for a total of 932 stores in 50 states and Puerto Rico. PacSun’s website address is www.pacsun.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.

A pile of us Radian6 folks – Amber (@AmberCadabra), Marcel (@lebrun), David (@davidalston) and Rich (@tweetrich) – will be descending on Austin this week for the South by Southwest Interactive festival.

If you’re not in the know, SXSWi features five days of panels and events all focused around the latest in emerging technology and new media. It’s promising to be a super great time, and we’d love to meet up with you there to say hello.

Here are just a few of the events happening at SXSW, and we’re planning to be at many of them. And of course, we’ll be adding events on the fly as they pop up on the schedule, so we can’t wait to catch you somewhere during the week.

Catch us here (all links are for the SCHED SXSW site, a great way to schedule your time at the fest):

Friday, March 13

Opening Tweetup

Mix @ Six

Saturday, March 14

Frog Opening Party

Happy Cog Karaoke

Big Digg Shindig

Sunday, March 15

SxSW Block Party

SxSW Web Awards

Avalon Bowling (first come first serve to play!)

Pool 2.0 (ticket/RSVP required)

Monday, March 16

Social Media for Social Good

Mashable Party

Tuesday, March 17

SXSWi Closing Party

Know of some other great events we should be checking out? Leave us a note and let us know. Can’t wait to see you there.

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.

Enhanced Segmentation

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.

Conversation Metrics

You can also sort your Topic Analysis results by eight different conversation metrics that demonstrate the discussion and engagement around your topic or keywords including:

•    number of posts
•    comment count
•    view count
•    vote count
•    Twitter followers
•    on topic inbound links
•    total inbound links
•    number of unique sources

Want to know which keywords or topics generate the most commenting activity? Which blog post generated the most Twitter impressions? Now you can see the buzz around your topics at a glance, and even set up As It Happens email and IM alerts for even the narrowest slices of your data to keep a close watch on the segments that matter most to you.

Have questions about any of the new features?  Reach out to our customer support team and learn about what’s new and how to make it work for you.

This weekend’s rollout of new Radian6 features includes a substantial addition: the indexing of posted comments across the web.

Let’s face it: 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 isn’t linear. It’s 360 degrees, which means that a discussion may start on a blog, carry over into the comments, and inspire new and different posts on other sites. It’s a cycle, and tracking that cycle is something that’s important to you as you follow the path of conversation about your business.

Now with Radian6, you can view mentions of your brand and other keywords that matter to you even when they appear in the comments rather than just in the post itself.  Radian6′s comment indexing includes all of the information gathered through our new integration with Backtype.com (http://www.backtype.com) as well as comments we’ve gathered through our own comment crawling.  Results for your topic profile will include a full 360 degree view of a conversation, and all relevant mentions of the topic you’ve defined.

How much of the conversation about your brand happens in original posts vs. comments?  Are your fans commenting on other posts and recommending your product? Are your competitors active on blogs? Well, now you’ll know.

We’d love to hear from you too. How is monitoring comments across social media going to help you? What other benefits do you see in hearing the full cycle of conversations on social sites?

Have questions about the new Radian6 features? Reach out to our customer support team and learn about what’s new and how to make it work for you.

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 build a history of that information for your team. And later, you might want to analyze and segment your data by those labels.

Radian6′s new source tagging capability lets you do just that. You can classify individuals and information sources with labels that you define, and later break your data down, sorted by those tags.

From the workflow mode of the River of News widget, or right inside the Conversation Sidebar from your RoN or 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.

For instance, if I receive a tweet from Richard Binhammer in my As It Happens email, I might tag Richard in the Conversation Sidebar with:

- fan (since he’s a wonderful advocate for our product)
- customer
- Dell (since I want to be sure and associate him with his company)
- Hat (just in case I wanted to know that lots of guys with cowboy hats talk about my brand)
- SXSW (will meet with him at SXSW)

Now, when anyone else on my internal team sees a tweet from Richard within the platform or in their As It Happens emails, they’ll be able to see all the source tags associated with Richard, and add their own tags they may find helpful for others to know.

How does this help? Two valuable aspects of source tagging are analysis and managing workflow.

Analysis

In addition to the pure identification we discussed above, analyzing the data you’ve tagged can prove especially valuable. From within the dashboard, you can filter the posts in your River of News by source tags you’ve assigned, and see who’s driving the conversation. Later, create reports, graphs, and data segmentation in your Topic Analysis widgets filtered by those tags, or even focus your listening or analysis on these tagged groups.

For instance, let’s say I want to pay careful attention to my SXSW contacts moving foward. I can set up a new As It Happens email or IM notification just for this specific source tag. I’d create a Topic Analysis widget from my Radian6 topic profile and filter by the SXSW source tag. Then, I’d click on the graph slice for the SXSW tag segment, open a new River of News for that tag, and set up a new alert. Now, I’ll be able to listen to and monitor that segment of my contacts at a glance.

Workflow

One challenge of having many team members engaged in outreach or business development also means that information and intelligence about sources is golden. A moment to add a source tag for a post, and every user on your team now has instant information about that source.

That helps provide context for outreach and engagement (never worry about a salesperson reaching out to a competitor again), expands the corporate knowledge base, and encourages others to share information they have about sources or contacts across the social web. The more information you capture, the more ways you have to analyze it.

Source tagging provides you with a social web caller ID system to help identify, manage, and segment the sources engaging in discussion around your brand. Have other ideas about how source tags can help you? Let us and others know in the comments.

Have questions about the new Radian6 features? Reach out to our customer support team and learn about what’s new and how to make it work for you.

Within the enterprise, listening is more than a linear process. Monitoring social media means not only being able to hear what’s being said about your brand in a stream of information, but understanding what to do with that intelligence once you have it.

You need a listening grid – a system of gathering information, categorizing and segmenting it based on your needs, communicating internally about responses and engagement, and having up-to-the-minute notification of happenings in social media that are relevant to you.

Radian6′s new slate of features and enhancements empowers users within the enterprise to set up that listening grid, managing all points along the path of communication from awareness to engagement, responses, and learnings that can improve the business as a whole.
This week, we’ll be sharing details and ideas for how these new features can create better company wide listening, better engagement through deeper customer insight, cost effective scalalbility of outreach, better internal collaboration, increased visibility for management, and stronger measurement of social media ROI.

The Conversation Sidebar

Radian6 has launched the new conversation sidebar, a streamlined solution for integrating the listening grid within the enterprise. The new Conversation Sidebar enables you to have an internal conversation with team members about each 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.

In addition to your communication team, you can share these valuable insights with customer service, sales, product and executive teams – anyone using the system -  and coordinate your responses to the community.
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 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 also provides the ability to add social tags to each post source, giving companies a method to identify, track, and determine how to handle each post from that source. By sharing that information across the enterprise, you can see who’s driving the conversation about you, provide context for each interaction, and spread the overall knowledge base about your community.

As It Happens Email and IM

Sometimes you’re not working in the Radian6 dashboard, but you’d like to stay on top of a particular topic profile. Now, Radian6 offers the ability for users to get email or Jabber-compatible IM notifications for specific topic profiles at intervals they select.

Alerts are delivered to your inbox or IM client as results are discovered, and include a link to open the alert in your web browser. There you’ll find the Conversation Sidebar and workflow capabilities for team collaboration and response. Once you act on an alert and update the Conversation Sidebar, a new alert will be issued with the updates so everyone stays in the loop about the most recent activity. And if you assign a post to a member of your team, they’ll get an email notifying them so they can act on it.

Now, you’ll be able to get up-to-the-minute notifications when new and relevant posts arrive, and engage with them in a timely and appropriate way. Never miss a relevant post again.

Questions about any of the new features? Feel free to drop a note to our support team or contact your account manager and let us know how we can help.