With the ease of use of Web 2.0 social media sites consumers are now publishers and broadcasters.  They have the ability to share their opinions, needs, complaints, and ideas in a way that is not only immediate but permanently recorded and easily spread.  Consumers are no longer whispering amongst themselves.  They are shouting from the tops of mountains.  They are shouting out to brands.

But are their favorite brands listening to them?  And if they are listening are they then engaging in such a way that:

When we publicly launched the Radian6 platform only 10 months ago it was after following an interactive process where our future customers told us exactly what they needed to monitor and analyze in social media.  This was our EAP or early adopter program and we grateful to those early pioneers for using our solution and for all of the insight and feedback they sent our way.

Photo - Marcel Lebrun, CEO of Radian6

(Republished from a guest post David Alston, Radian6’s VP Marketing, did on the TopRank Online Marketing Blog on May 8, 2008)

Social media has simplified the art of the soapbox shout. Information is shared with the masses now using easy-to-use Web 2.0 tools and is recorded and cached for infinity. A shout out loud in social media has no geographic boundaries and is not time-limited. These two points make the non-stop monitoring of social media an important to-do for any brand owner. And monitoring social media does not just mean blogs. It should include video and image sharing sites and microblogging sites like Twitter, along with opinion and discussion forums.

This week I was interviewed on the best ways to measure social media and the different applications for both PR and advertising professionals.

At the Rising Stars Gala & Awards Ceremony last night at the Delta Beauséjour in Moncton, New Brunswick Radian6’s CTO, Chris Newton, was selected as one of this year’s Rising Stars from this year’s list of IT professionals nominated by peers for their superlative work and contribution to the industry and their community.

Congrats Chris!