Undoubtedly, Facebook is one of the hottest topics of conversation around social media, and an increasingly important part of social media in business.

A couple of years ago, it was an upstart social network for college students. Then it was the everyman’s social network, spreading like wildfire to teenagers and grandparents alike. And today, Facebook has taken hold as a significant and important player not just for individuals, but for companies who are looking to interact and engage with their customers online.

As a social media company, we absolutely understand the importance and significance of Facebook for our customers as well as the social media industry as a whole. So we wanted to talk with you a bit about how Radian6 approaches Facebook, and a few things you should know and keep in mind when including it in your listening and engagement strategy.

What We Cover

Radian6′s coverage of Facebook is built on Facebook’s Graph API. In clear terms, what that means is that Facebook provides us with a data stream of:

• public wall posts or status updates
• wall posts on Facebook Pages (or Fan Pages, as they’re commonly known)
• wall posts on Facebook Community Pages.

Also, a cool new feature: Facebook “likes” (from the Facebook Likes “plugin”) are now included in the “Votes and Likes” metrics on your Radian6 dashboard. Our current support is for the Like Plugin embedded on websites external to Facebook.

So if 20 people Like an on-topic piece of content where you’ve got the plugin installed, we’ll count it in the Votes and Likes metric in your dashboard.

(Note: while you’ll see Facebook posts in your search results, Facebook still requires you to log in to be able to view the public individual profile wall posts on Facebook itself.)

As it stands right now, the Facebook Graph API doesn’t include comments on wall posts. So, for instance, if someone posts a link on your Facebook wall and 10 people comment underneath that, those comments won’t be included in your Radian6 search results (even if they include keywords from your Topic Profile). It’s a current limitation, but we’re actively working on adding this capability.

As Facebook continues to build out their Graph API, we’ll continue to expand and refine the coverage that we can provide via Radian6. We’re going to continue carrying out coverage checks and enhancements on an ongoing basis, and we’ll keep you updated on how that coverage evolves.

Measuring Facebook

It’s important to note that comparing exact metrics of brand mentions on Twitter versus Facebook can be misleading, because conversations in open-access areas of Facebook only represent a snapshot of the potential total brand mentions. If a mention is posted in a closed or private area of Facebook, we won’t be able to include it in your results. As a business, it’s important to keep this distinction in mind, because it will impact the way you can measure and account for Facebook results in your monitoring and measurement activities.

A Note About Privacy

Something that’s very important to make clear: if your individual Facebook profile privacy settings are set to anything other than being viewable by “Everyone”, or if your Group is set to Closed/Secret, neither we nor any other search or monitoring provider will be able to see or find anything posted there.

Facebook is only a partially open network by design, which means that what’s visible to the outside world is dictated by the users themselves, and controllable via profile settings and preferences. For individuals, you can find those settings on your profile under Account > Privacy Settings. For Page administrators, you can adjust who can post to your page Wall your admin section, but wall posts on Pages are, by design, public. Facebook Groups can be made Open (completely public), Closed, or Secret, the last two only being visible to group members (and controllable by the administrator).

If your individual profile is private but you post to the Wall of a Facebook Page or public Group for a company or brand, that post will be publicly visible and available to Radian6 and other monitoring or search tools via the Social Graph API.

In short, Radian6 can and will only ever cover items that are classified as public, or that are posted in Facebook’s public areas.

What’s Next

We know how important it is to you that we stay on top of what’s happening in social media, and how important Facebook is to you. We’re listening, and we’re continuing to build out our coverage capabilities daily so that you never miss a relevant post.
Facebook presents a unique challenge in the social space, but we’re up for it. And we’ll continue to keep you posted as our coverage and capabilities for Facebook grow.

Have any questions about what you can and can’t do with Facebook data, or what you’re able to find via listening? Let us know. We’ll do our best to answer.

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.

The Radian6 Quickstart Menu

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.

Radian6 Quickstart Tool - Brand Monitoring

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.

Radian6 Quickstart - Monthly Estimate Summary

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.

Radian6 Widget Gallery

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.

Radian6 Influencer Widget - Summary View

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.

Radian6 Influencer EQ

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…

Many of you read Chris Newton’s post last week  introducing Radian6′s take on automated sentiment, and we promised some more details on how it works inside the Radian6 system.

So without further ado, give a click and download this handy PDF that walks you through some of the basics of setting up and analyzing automated sentiment capabilities in Radian6. And of course, if you’re a Radian6 user, you can find some nitty gritty details in your dashboard under the FAQ section.

Automated Sentiment is just one of the capabilities we rolled out this past year, too. Have a look at some of the other stuff, like CRM and web analytics integration and Google Sidewiki monitoring, in these earlier posts. We want to help you make the most of Radian6 and the insights it can provide.

In 2010, we’re looking forward to talking more with you about how you’re using Radian6, and what would make it better, easier, and more valuable for you. Many of the features and capabilities we’ve developed and integrated have been based on your input about the value of social media monitoring and engagement, and how you connect the dots between your social media work and other areas of your business.

Please keep the feedback coming. Email us at community@radian6.com anytime with your suggestions and input, and look for more advancements in the coming year for weaving social media monitoring, measurement, and engagement deeper into your business.

Thanks for all of your support this year. We can’t wait to continue the conversation in 2010.

One of the most talked about capabilities of social media monitoring platforms is sentiment analysis, more specifically the automation of same. It’s a technology that’s important and can be valuable to companies’ social media analysis, but it’s critical to understand how it works, when it’s useful, and what its limitations are.

At Radian6, we’ll be publicly releasing our automated sentiment capabilities inside the platform early next week, and they’ll be immediately available to all current and new customers. As a bit of background, however, we thought we’d talk a bit about what we see as the role of automated sentiment in social media monitoring and engagement, and how Radian6 is approaching it.

What is Automated Sentiment technology, and How Does Radian6 Use It?

Automated sentiment analysis is a system for automatically determining the sentiment of a sentence or phrase. Sentiment refers to the thought or mood of a post and can be either positive, neutral or negative.

Radian6 automated sentiment reviews on-topic posts as they come in, determines the sentiment of the post at the sentence level, and aggregates a positive, negative, or neutral designation at the post level based on specified sentiment keywords and phrases. If a particular document or post touches multiple topics, sentiment can be determined for each separate topic.

Stay tuned on the Radian6 blog next week for more detail on Radian6′s automated sentiment capabilities.

What Automated Sentiment Can Help With

As a first pass, automated sentiment analysis can help streamline the workflow of processing a high volume of posts by providing preliminary determinations of sentiment for each post. Users can then follow up with review and manual adjustment as necessary. Automated sentiment also provides an initial snapshot of postive-negative-neutral ratios, and can help identify trends at a macro level such as sparklines or aggregate changes in sentiment over time.

Looking at ratios of positive to negative sentiment over time can sometimes indicate collective brand preferences as expressed online, or the overall mindset or mood of audiences. The unfiltered and unedited nature of the opinions expressed on the social web and tracked through sentiment analysis can sometimes offer a more realistic, less clinical view of how customers and communities are responding to companies and brands.

Armed with this high level analysis and trend information, Radian6 users can better craft engagement strategy, understand hot button issues and topics around their brand, and reach out to their customers informed about the pulse of opinion about the company and it’s work.

Automated Sentiment and The Human Factor

Sentiment analysis, whether automated or manual, is a subjective process and always needs to be considered in the context of business goals.
What’s read as positive for one person or in one context might be considered neutral for another, so businesses need to consider and outline criteria for positive, negative, and neutral definitions based on their goals for online presence and engagement.

In addition, the complexity and nuance of the English language combined with available technologies for text analytics means that sentiment analysis cannot currently achieve 100% accuracy. In fact, accuracy rates across sentiment analysis engines can be highly variable, as the criteria to define an “accurate” sentiment determination is also somewhat dependent upon human interpretation and context.

There will always be a need for human review and involvement to verify automated results, and ensure that sentiment levels are tagged within the context of individual and unique business goals and agreed upon criteria.

For More on Radian6 Sentiment Analysis…

Stay tuned for a post early next week with some additional detail about the technical features of Radian6′s automated sentiment, and information on how to set it up inside your Radian6 dashboard. And as always, if you have questions or feedback for our team regarding this or any other feature, we’d welcome your input and conversation.

Image by richkidsunite

Sidewiki has been a hot issue since Google announced its release in late September. Why is it so hot? Google Sidewiki is a browser sidebar that enables you to contribute and read helpful information alongside any web page. Sidewiki provides an easy way for users to share their insights about any page on the web. Now any web page is social.

Google Sidewiki Monitoring Support

Last month, we rolled out Googel Sidewiki monitoring support because we know many of you asked if Sidewiki posts will be included in Radian6 results. By adding the Sidewiki feed URL as a Source Filter in your Topic Profile Configuration, Sidewiki posts will show up as comments in your Radian6 results.

So, we are making it easier than ever to put on your listening ears and find out what is being said on Google Sidewiki. As a Radian6 user, check out our newest training resources to assist you in configuring your Topic Profile to gather Sidewiki results:

• Training Video: Google Sidewiki available on your Radian6 Dashboard Video Tutorial area
• Radian6 Google Sidewiki Quick Reference Guide

We’re pleased to announce a Radian6 update we rolled out over the weekend, and wanted to communicate the new features that you now have available in your Radian6 account. In recent weeks we’ve been focused on adding coverage, streamlining workflows, enabling enterprise operating environments, and reaching out to an increasingly global user community.

Google Sidewiki Monitoring Support

We know many of you have asked if Sidewiki posts will be included in Radian6 results, and the answer is yes!  By adding the Sidewiki feed URL as a Source Filter in your Topic Profile Configuration, Sidewiki posts will show up as comments in your Radian6 results. Your Sidewiki feed URL will look like: http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/domainpath/googleblog.blogspot.com%2F/full?sortorder=published

Replace “googleblog.blogspot.com” with the URL of the domain you wish to monitor. Also stay tuned here for an upcoming how-to post on adding Sidewiki content to your results.

Portuguese Language Support

Social media is an increasingly global phenomenon. We recognize the need for social media monitoring beyond North America, and that the needs of international organizations may span across the globe. As a result, we’ve listed Portuguese as an available language during your Topic Profile Configuration process. Now, you can search exclusively for Portuguese keywords, or include Portuguese results in your overall searches. And as always, it’s easy to filter to include or exclude specific languages using the language filters for each topic profile – handy if you’re monitoring a large volume of content.

Dashboard Sharing

We also know that the social media monitoring needs of large organizations can be unique. Engaged organizations monitoring large communities may find themselves with several users who each reach out daily to dozens of community members, and need to have consistent information at their fingertips quickly. Power users may want to configure and share their monitoring dashboards with their teams. Or, management teams may want a turn-key dashboard to review monitoring results without having to spend time on configuration and setup. To address needs like this, we’ve rolled out the ability to copy and move a complete dashboard to another user in your domain.

At the top of your Radian6 dashboard, you’ll find a new “cog” icon to the left of your dashboard icons.  The dashboard cog allows you to select options for copying and moving your dashboards, as well as generating dashboard reports and renaming your existing dashboards. Copying a dashboard will create a complete duplicate of a dashboard from your account and send it to another, while retaining the original in your display. Moving a dashboard recreates the dashboard for the new user, and removes it from the original user’s display.

In addition to Copy/Move Dashboard, we’ve also added a simple alerting system. Users are notified when new dashboards are sent to their account, can accept and deny incoming dashboards, and defer accepting a new dashboard until later.

A few other notes on the new Dashboard Copy and Move capabilities:

• Minimized widgets will not be copied or moved. This allows you to customize dashboards with visible widgets and send without having to delete or reconfigure other widgets you may have on your dashboard.
• Radian6 currently has a limit of 8 dashboards per user. If you have more than 8 dashboards, you will not be able to receive a new one. However you will be provided with the option to remove one, or you may defer accepting the new dashboard until later.

Automatic Widget Repositioning

Along with the Copy/Move Dashboard capabilities, we’ve built in a fail-safe feature to guard against “losing” dashboard widgets off-screen when changing display or resolution size. Radian6 will now detect widgets that may be located off-screen upon login, and will automatically reposition them on-screen.

…

Thank you, as always, for your continued support and feedback. Our platform is built and improved with your needs in mind, so we always welcome your suggestions for how to make it a more powerful monitoring, engagement, and measurement tool for your business.

Here we go again!

We’re excited to roll out some new features and enhancements to the Radian6 platform, based on your feedback.

We’ve improved widget usability by parking a variety of widget operations into a single Actions button (look for the little cog icon) at the bottom right corner of each widget. With the Cog button, you can:

* Manage Alerts
* Export Report
* Copy Widget (New)
* Move Widget (New)
* Change Font Size (New)

We’ve also given you the capability of looking at your Topic Trends graph by media type, language, and region. Sweet!
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A few of the other nifty things you'll notice in your dashboard now...

Copy and Move Widgets
Now, copy and/or move your widgets to other dashboards you own, or send them to the dashboards of other users inside your company or client ID. Now, your power users can configure widgets on behalf of the team and deploy them over to the management team, clients, or other users with just a few clicks.

Change Font Size Widget

This new tool gives the user the ability to change the font size of the posts in the River of News. We've provided 5 size settings which enable you to increase and decrease the size of the items in the RON. Certainly helps to make things more readable, hey? We know a bunch of you have been clamoring for this, so here you go!

Video Library
Nothing like a video to let the new stuff sink in! Learn more about the new features and how to use them by watching this short new product overview video. Have ideas for other videos and tutorials that would be helpful to you? We're all ears.

Within the next few weeks, we expect to share with you some major product functionality news as well. Hint: more sources and more data to wrap your brain around... Stay tuned!

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.