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.