One of the biggest hurdles to jump in integrating social media into a business is figuring out the most cost-effective and functional way to scale its use. As your organization grows and continues to weave social media into its processes, it will be critical to establish a workflow that extends across departments while still allowing your teams to engage efficiently.

The need for a tool that helps businesses scale and simultaneously streamline their social media working processes is growing by leaps and bounds, which is why we are thrilled to announce the release of our upcoming product, the Radian6 Engagement Console.

Radian6′s new Engagement Console is a desktop application that:

• Extends social media monitoring, listening, and engagement to every desktop within your company.
• Is a complete social Web client that lets you listen to all media types, including blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn Answers, Facebook fan pages & public discussion groups, as well as online mainstream news sites.
• Allows real-time collaboration among your team members and one-click-workflow assignment of posts enabling faster and more cost effective engagement.
• Ties into the full power of Radian6, so your teams can channel the right conversations to the right people within your enterprise.
• Records all interactions in Radian6 for comprehensive operational reporting, and conversation analysis and reporting.

The Engagement Console is outfitted with a number of features to help you organize and maximize social media monitoring and engagement throughout your department and company.

Comprehensive Listening Coverage

Customize a listening grid by breaking out your conversation stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks for your Radian6 topic profile can be separated out by media type to keep you in the loop on exactly where people are talking about your brand or area of expertise.

Fast-Moving, Streamlined Workflow

Open up the Workflow function next to your Radian6 conversation stacks to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and watch them respond in real time. Pull up a stack of your own assignments and start engaging on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and conversation threads right from the Engagement Console. For even more efficiency, create one-click workflow buttons that assign priority, status, sentiment, and user assignment to multiple posts all at once.

All the conversations you choose to participate in – and the ensuing engagement between your team and external constituents – will be recorded for reference. Review how your team handled the conversation, any notes they provided, and see how your interaction impacted and rippled through the larger business community.

Multi-Network Integration and Social Profile Viewing

Keep pace with all the activity happening around multiple Twitter accounts as well as your Facebook account with the Engagement Console. Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. For added ease of use, click on the Auto-Shorten URL function.

Follow the activity on Facebook by observing and responding to status updates, wall posts, comments, and “likes”. Also view news feeds for your Facebook friends, see new photos or videos as they’re being uploaded, and leave your own comments and status updates without leaving the Console.

For a more well-rounded and contextual look at the people in your community, click on the name of a particular user to check out their comprehensive social profile, including where they can be found online and a history of interaction, notes you’ve made, and conversations you’ve had with them.

Reporting and Analysis

Within your Radian6 stack, take a look at the post volume for your particular topic profile with the built-in, at-a-glance time series graph. Click through to access the Radian6 dashboard to review and analyze metrics, segment and filter your data for micro-level analysis, and generate reports for your department and management teams.

Want More?

The Engagement Console is currently being previewed and will be available to Radian6 users in April 2010.

If you head on over to our Preview page, you’ll see a form you can fill out to let us know you’re interested in the Engagement Console. We’ll keep you in the loop as things progress and let you know exactly when it launches in April.

We’re excited about this announcement and what the Engagement Console will potentially do to advance the cause of listening and engaging within the enterprise. Have initial questions? Please let us know in the comments!