New Features in Radian6: Quickstart, Widget Gallery and Influencer Enhancements

By Amber Naslund
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 | 42342 Commentshttp://www.radian6.com/blog/2010/02/new-features-in-radian6-quickstart-widget-gallery-and-influencer-enhancements/New+Features+in+Radian6%3A+Quickstart%2C+Widget+Gallery+and+Influencer+Enhancements2010-02-23+17%3A25%3A16Amber+Naslund
Tags: Listening, radian6 features, Social Media, social media analysis, social media measurment, Social Media Monitoring
Posted in: Announcements, Features, Platform, Social Media Monitoring

As always, we’re grateful for the feedback we get from our customers and community. Why? Because they form the foundation for the updates, enhancements, and feature additions we make to the Radian6 platform.

Many of our users love the power and  flexibility of the Radian6 dashboard, and how much you can customize. But we also realize that getting started can be daunting if you’re new to the platform and all of it’s capabilities. Today, Radian6 has rolled out some key new features available in the dashboard to make it easier to dive into the data, and we’re excited to share them with you.

The Topic Profile QuickStart Tool

What it is:

A quick easy method for users to create new Topic Profiles and set up a Radian6 dashboard. If you’re a first-time user of Radian6, the QuickStart tool will launch automatically, and you can launch it anytime thereafter by clicking the QuickStart icon in your dashboard toolbar. And you can still configure topic profiles in the Configuration section of your dashboard, too.

A series of guiding prompts in the QuickStart will help you set up your topic profile, including easily grouping  your keywords by brand, competitor, or industry. We will also auto-configure your sentiment settings to look for sentiment around the things you identified as “your brand” specifically (company name, product brands, etc.). You can always change those in the Configuration screen as well.

Quickly filter by region, media type, or language, then get a snapshot summary of your estimated monthly result volume so you can tweak and refine your topic.

Why It’s Useful:

The QuickStart feature makes generating topic profiles in Radian6 a quick and simple process from start to finish, which is helpful for a new Radian6 user, or users who aren’t particularly technical.  New users will be able to get started with their monitoring faster and easier than ever before. And in conjunction with our new Widget Gallery (read on), you’ll have a completely new, streamlined experience for getting started with Radian6.

The Widget Gallery

What It Is:

Also launchable from the Quickstart menu on the Radian6 dashboard, our new Widget Gallery gives you the ability to add any of  44 preconfigured Radian6 analysis widgets to your dashboard with just a few clicks. Simply select your topic profile and date range, and you can choose from our  basic analysis widgets, or more specialized widgets in social media metrics, twitter analysis, brand analysis, competitive intelligence, and workflow and engagement.

Why It’s Useful:

We’ve reduced the legwork by placing 44 powerful pre-configured widgets at your fingertips without having to learn how to configure them, so all you have to do is point and shoot and get working on the part that you do best: pulling insights from your data that are important to your business.

And of course, the Widget Gallery is just a few of the  hundreds of possible widgets you can build in Radian6, but they’re bound to give you a few ideas of your own. Users can still customize and build widgets as always from the dashboard, from scratch. And we’ll continue to add more and more turn key configurations to the Widget Gallery in the future, so if you have suggestions for widget configurations that you use often, let us know in the comments or with an email to community@radian6.com.

Influencer Widget Enhancements

What It Is:

Our Influencer Analysis widget has gotten a significant upgrade, thanks to your continued input and feedback. Our unique real-time tracking of social media metrics across the web and our ability to set the weightings to calculate influence has been a user favorite.  But all media types were previously mixed together, and weightings would often apply to one media type and not necessarily another.

So we’ve pulled together an enhanced approach to uncovering influencers. We’ve added a handful of new capabilities and views, including the ability to break out all of your influencer data by media type and make use of additional social media metrics only applicable to certain media types (ex: thread size on forums, follower count on twitter, views on videos, etc.)..

We’ve also given you the option to display your influencer results in a few different ways, including new bar graph and conversation cloud options in addition to the traditional grid display.

The new Summary Mode gives you a snapshot of the top 5 influencers in each media type, while the media specific tabs will show you the top 250 influencers for each media type. In bar mode, you’ll see the Influencer Score for each source next to their relevant results.

Hovering over the bar or a term in your Conversation Cloud gives you key influence metrics, and clicking on the source will open a River of News widget displaying the on-topic posts for that Influencer.

We’ve also refined the Influencer EQ area of your Topic Profile configuration to allow you to weight your influencer criteria by media type and make use of new social metrics unique to that media type, for more detailed and customized influence scoring on your on-topic results.

Note: we’ve also updated the Influencer CSV report to reflect the breakdown by media type. If you’re using this report, you’ll want to update your references accordingly.

Why It’s Useful:

Influence is at the heart of many social media endeavors, and as always, we’re dedicated to helping you view influence through the lens that’s right for your business. That means uncovering the well-known voices as well as the ones that might not be on your radar so that you can better understand who’s driving awareness and engagement for your brand.

Our new slate of influencer views and breakdowns will allow you to do deeper analysis of the entire influencer landscape around your business, and help you see both the high level snapshot of who might be important to you, and the drill down into details on metrics and specific results.

By looking at influencers in a number of ways and through the perspective of several types of data, you’ll be able to conduct more efficient outreach, understand which social media channels are making the biggest impact for you, and strategize about

Need More?

True to what we believe, we’re always listening. Our product enhancements and expansions are based on your feedback, and the way you’re telling us that you need Radian6 to work for you.

If you’d like some deeper overview and training on the new features, we’ve set up some open sessions for you to attend. Sign up for one of the dates below with your Radian6 login info:

• Thu, Feb 25, 2010 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST
• Fri, Feb 26, 2010 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM EST
• Tue, Mar 2, 2010 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM EST
• Wed, Mar 3, 2010 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM EST

And please keep the feedback coming; you can leave a comment, send us email at community@radian6.com with your suggestions, or reach out directly to your account and support teams to give them your input. Help us continue to shape Radian6 into the social media monitoring and engagement tool you need it to be.

If you’re new to the platform or just getting your arms around monitoring and measurement, give a look over some of the Radian6 use cases and product applications we’ve outlined over here. From lead generation to crisis management, community engagement and competitive intelligence, there’s more opportunity in listening than you might think.

We’re eager to hear your thoughts. Share with us in the comments and let’s keep the dialogue going.  And there’s more to come, so stay tuned…