Over the last few years, one of the core elements of the Radian6 philosophy has been the principle of sharing and engaging with our community. We built and grew a community team to do that, and it has become one of the hallmarks of our success. Lauren Vargas has been a chief architect of our community approach. She is as dedicated and resourceful as she is tireless, and has developed a justifiable reputation in the social media world for her successes on our behalf.

So it probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise to us that someone else recognized what a tremendous resource she is. Lauren is leaving Radian6 to become Community Management Strategist for Aetna (a Radian6 client). She’ll be assisting in the development of their community and social integration. And we all know she’ll be totally great at it.

Lauren, thank you for everything you’ve done for Radian6 (and salesforce.com), and we wish you nothing but the best.  Make sure Aetna knows to stock up on lots of Redbull in their vending machines.

Lauren’s departure leaves a big hole to fill. We’ve thought long and hard about what to do about it and have come to a tidy solution. Community is a key element of any company’s social strategy, including ours. We’ve decided it’s time to reunite Community and Social Strategy.

David B. Thomas joined us three months ago to build our Social Strategy approach, providing resources and assistance to our customers to help them better understand and value the ways that social media can support enterprise business objectives. (Keep your eyes open for an upcoming announcement in that regard.) Dave will take on the Community team in addition to Social Strategy, and help guide them together to the mutual objective of better serving our customers and community. Dave’s background in marketing, marketing communications and PR provides a solid business foundation for his experience as a blogger and online communicator. Heck, he’s even a successful author on the subject, co-writing ‘The Executives Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy’ with Mike Barlow. We are beyond pleased he agreed to accept this new joint role.

So I hope you can join us in congratulating two amazing people as they begin their new journeys ahead.

Tags: aetna, community management, David B. Thomas, lauren vargas