Many of you heard about the launch of Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center, which happened yesterday at the global technology company’s Austin headquarters. For those of you who didn’t hear, go ahead and click on that link up there to get the scoop — go ahead, we’ll wait — and/or take a peek at the video above.

Dell‘s Social Media Listening Command Center is not the first of its kind — Gatorade’s Mission Control Center kicked off the development of these enterprise-wide-yet-centralized social media listening stations. For organizations the size and caliber of Gatorade and Dell, social media listening centers make absolute sense, and we’ll see them continue to pop up in the future as more companies adapt their internal cultures to really embrace listening.

These command centers are living, breathing listening grids and they’re vital to the health of the brands that install them. Why? Because social media adoption, on both individual and organizational levels, is fundamentally changing the way we share our thoughts and opinions with each other, and companies must adapt to that change.

Dell and Gatorade have tangibly demonstrated that they understand online social communication channels are here to stay, and that those channels will only become more engrained in our day-to-day lives as technology continues to develop. Their adaptation to people’s growing propensity for digital sharing and chat is to develop enterprise-wide workflow systems to harness that chatter, put it in the hands of the right internal stakeholders, and use it to improve products, customer service, and even entire business models.

This is where social media — and social business — is headed. The depth of web-based listening necessary to improve the global marketplace will only increase as more people lean on their social networks and online communities to connect, share ideas and feedback, and, essentially, live their lives. And it will be imperative that organizations of every size integrate social media listening into their business strategies, create efficient workflows to process social media data, and develop strategies for company-wide engagement.

We’re proud to be working with such forward-thinking companies as Dell and PepsiCo (owner of Gatorade) to help them weave social media into the fibers of their businesses, and we’d like to congratulate them on leading the way with social innovation. Keep an eye out for more social media listening command centers in the months to come, as we’re sure we’ll be seeing more of them.

Here’s a look at just a few of the leading indicators of what the social media discussion entails today (and that’d be over 64,000 conversations just in the last month alone):

Location, Location, Location

Between the crowd-driven ecommerce like Groupon, location-based Tweets, and the badge rewards for applications like Foursquare and Gowalla, location is as prominent in social media as it is in real estate. And while the social wave started with massive, come-one-come-all social networks, business are now particularly interested in finding their focus, targeting their most loyal and local customer base as well as attracting those in their geographically relevant pools.

Why it matters: Geolocation has long term implications in everything from search to social media analysis and metrics, not to mention increased focus in more traditional communication efforts. Global businesses need to understand reach and market distribution on a geographic basis, and local businesses need to be able to fine tune their efforts. Mash location data up with behavioral data, and you start getting some powerful modeling indeed.

Social CRM

Once upon a time we talked about “engagement” as a universal term that meant connecting personally with customers and communities via social channels. The emergence of social CRM has figured heavily into the industry in the last year, evolving beyond simply a suite of enterprise tools and platforms, and more into a mindset or strategy that puts the cultivation of customers and community members – no matter where they make themselves known on the web – at its core. We call it answering the social phone, but the principles are largely the same: greeting your customers where they are, on their terms, and nurturing those relationships for long term, mutual benefit.

Why it matters: Relationship management, in its truest form, is far more nuanced than ever as customers no longer simply gather or communicate in company-hosted environments. And while a good deal of the discussion and engineering (including our platform) focuses on how to tie data together across a business and provide a solid analysis framework for understanding customer behavior and needs, there’s an invaluable and complimentary human framework of listening, communication, content, outreach, and community development that will round out the sCRM space and its business applications.

Measurement & Accountability

First the question was “can we measure social media”, and the overwhelming conversations today agree that yes, we certainly can. Then the question was “how”, so platforms like Radian6 created broader and deeper ways to bring in relevant social data and conduct some analysis around them (especially connecting dots with things like CRM systems and web analytics).

Now the discussions center around what, specifically, businesses should be measuring in their own context of goals and objectives, what social data points actually matter in a business context (and how they’ve evolved from more traditional metrics), and how to derive insights and map out plans based on what we learn.

Why it matters: Social media, in its early adoption phases, is more of a cost center than a revenue channel (and in many ways, the balance may continue to sit heavy on the investment side). Beyond just “ROI”, businesses are seeking to understand the impact of the investment they’re making in people, time, and tools from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. And as social media gains a foothold in an overall business model, companies are very much looking for some direction as to how to tie it into their overall reporting and accountability functions.

Privacy & Participation

The beginning of the social media wave saw celebration of the idea of open networks: anyone could participate, however they liked, and we wanted access to everyone and everything. In the last year, concerns and discussions around privacy and information access have been on the rise as the gleam wears off the shiny social media coating, and we start taking a longer-term view of how social plays into our human networks. In a business context, companies are more closely examining the need for social media participation guidelines and governance, especially in heavily regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, or government.

Why it matters: While we love the free flow of information and ideas that the social web enables, we also want to be sure that we have established expectations, parameters, and understandings about what information can and should go where. As individuals we want to make educated choices about how public our information is, and as businesses we want to be sure our approach to social media is methodical and well-thought (rather than trying to throw a runaway train into reverse).

Social Media Integration

There’s no doubt that social media integration discussions are far more prevalent than they were 12 months ago. And while there are still plenty of conversations around social media roles, campaigns, and ownership inside companies, more and more organizations like PepsiCo, United Healthcare, and Dell are working out ways to wire social media not only into broader marketing efforts, but into other areas of the business like customer service, product development, or human resources.

Why it matters: Social media as a stand-alone entity has a limited shelf life. Much like the phone or even email, communication with customers and feedback from relevant communities drives many areas of the business, and not all of them front-line communication roles. So while vertical adoption of social media can establish a center of operations, horizontal adoption and integration is what will take social media from the tactical front lines and immerse it in the overall business model.

What Has Your Attention?

If you’re a business that’s employing anything from a basic listening strategy to a full-blown social media business approach, what’s your focus right now? What topics, questions, and discussions are top of mind with your business right now?

We’d love to hear from you.

We’ve created both .ePub and .mobi files of May’s eBook, which are readable on most eReaders and eReader applications. Of course, we’ll have an eye out for growing popularity in additional file types, but we’ll be sticking with these two file formats for the foreseeable future.

The formatting isn’t perfect (yet), but the content is there and is now as portable as you need it to be. Read it on your own time and let us know what you think; we want to hear from you.

.Mobi file of May’s ebook

.ePub file of May’s ebook

& MTV is listening….

MTV is changing TV – yet again.  It’s listening and engaging with its audience – which at first glance, just sounds smart, not new.  But when you consider the audience is engaging from Twitterville, it starts to sound really interesting.

TV and Twitter Talking Together?

What do Tiger Woods, Adam Lambert and Twilight’s movie cast have in common?  While it sounds like the start of a bad joke, they’re actually the hot topics among the at-home TV audience for an MTV pop culture show – where real-time conversations from Twitter are integrated into the content of the TV show; “It’s On With Alexa Chung”.

Alexa Chung is a 26-year-old former British model turned TV host. Her American MTV show debuted in June featuring celebrity interviews, live music and videos: a mash up of TV and web to attract a young audience who spends time on Facebook and Twitter.

The audience interacts across a number of platforms:  TV, online and mobile. There’s a large and active following on Twitter. The show engages that Twitter audience who tweet their thoughts about the guests and the show. Then MTV takes the pulse of viewers by aggregating the themes of those Twitter conversations. What’s cool is that MTV then reflects that picture back to the audience via a visualization called Twitter Tracker.

MTV’s Twitter Tracker visualizes the volume of tweets around a guest or show topic based on the Twitter activity generated by MTV’s hosts, guests and fans. An individual who will never step inside the MTV studio is still able to engage, contribute content and become a catalyst to generate even more conversations – while becoming part of a community of fans and part of the story.

The show broadcasts weekdays for 30-minutes but the Twitter Tracker keeps the pulse of conversation going for the other 23.5 hours a day on its website — giving fans the opportunity to engage anytime.  This builds on MTV’s continued leadership in being a brand that engages its audience where, when and how they want.

The Genesis of Twitter Tracker:

The potential to use this innovative application with a daily audience has its roots in a couple of successful one-time shows. Twitter visualizations were first used during the MTV Video Music Awards show September 13^th and again during the European Music Awards show November 5^th.  As the shows were being broadcast, the Twitter Tracker was reflecting what people at home were tweeting about the show, connecting the at-home audience with a TV host who was reporting what was being tweeted. The show inspired the tweets and the audience’s tweets fed the show.  What celebrity doesn’t want instant feedback?

Here’s a taste of the first MTV Twitter visualization at the VMAs:

How it works and why it’s important:

These applications and content are created through a partnership of MTV, Twitter, Stamen Design and Radian6. Stamen creates the great visuals and applications that plug into the Radian6 platform.

For Radian6, it’s great to have clients like MTV who use the Radian6 platform in new and different ways. It also shows the potential of integration of social media with TV and other forms of offline media.

More importantly it shows how MTV works on growing a community. Engaging their audience and fans online at any time of day keeps them connected with content, not just during a broadcast. It also enables a window into the audience to discover what they’re thinking and talking about.  It’s no longer just about watching TV; it’s about enabling a live interaction between the show and the audience.  By bringing the community into the content, brings new people into the conversation and reinforces to the audience that they are part of the whole experience.

So what’s next?

MTV has been a leader in pretty well everything in media since it launched in 1981.  It’s a network built on firsts: in programming, technology, popular culture and personalities.  They’ve continually shaped and reflected the new and the emerging and no doubt will challenge us at Radian6 with new ideas to engage their community in the experience.

About Rob: Rob Begg is Radian6’s Director of Business Development for the media and entertainment industries.  You can connect with Rob on Twitter @rbegg.

And at Radian6, we’re poised to help take them to the next level, delivering some broader and deeper listening capabilities to their core marketing and product teams.

Why Social Media?

Aaron Lilly, a Sr. Marcom Architect at Microsoft, explained that Microsoft sees immense value in the social space, because it helps the company connect more deeply with customers, prospects and enthusiasts on their terms and wherever they are online. This improved connection allows Microsoft to share the news and information on the company or products that their customers are asking for, where they are asking for it.

“Radian6 helps us discover where important conversations are happening online, so we can be part of them,” Lilly explains. “There’s a huge value in being able to have a rich, real-time dialog with customers across our diverse businesses.”

Lilly says Microsoft’s involvement in social media is both proactive and reactive. They’re proactively contributing to the dialogue about Microsoft by sharing information and providing access to the company through social channels like Facebook and Twitter. But they can also be responsive to the issues and conversations that happen around and about the company and their products, often helping to clarify a misunderstanding or offer quick and valid direction from the source.

Whether it be questions around the Bing search engine, or chatter about how Office is impacting the way people work, those discussions give Microsoft lots of opportunity to better understand how their community views their brand, products, and business, and lets them use those insights to inform future strategy.

Why Radian6?

Given the breadth and diversity of Microsoft’s businesses, and the volume of online conversations, the central marketing team needed a tool that could work alongside their existing tools and processes and that could not only handle the volume of buzz but also make sense of it all in a business context. As Microsoft builds out internal capabilities in social media through tools like Looking Glass, Radian6 provides global scale and depth capabilities today and integration opportunities for the future.

“For brands like Bing, Office or Zune, we have large inter-connected marketing and product teams,” says Lilly. “It’s really important that we’re all looking at the social conversations through the same lens. Radian6 provides both breadth of coverage and the depth to analyze and respond.”

We at Radian6 are excited about the possibilities working with the teams at Microsoft, and helping them make the most out of their social media strategies. Thanks to the Microsoft crew for bringing us on, and stay tuned as we share more about our work together in the future.

This weekend, we’re excited to announce some powerful new features and enhancements to the Radian6 platform. This new release will provide you powerful new capabilities for analysis and measurement, data filtering and segmentation, and significant new ways to track and collaborate on your community engagement.

We’ve included a snapshot of the new features below, and over the course of this week, we’ll be sharing more detail on each feature in additional posts. If you’re a Radian6 customer, you can also find helpful tutorial videos under the Help > Video Tutorials section of your dashboard, outlining the new features.

As always, if you have feedback or questions for our team about the use of the new features, please let us know. This weekend’s new release includes the following new capabilities:

As-it-happens Email and IM

Never miss a relevant post again. Now, from any analysis widget, you can create an As-It-Happens alert to have new results for that topic delivered straight to your inbox or instant messenger (IM) client at an interval you select. Each alert hyperlinks directly to the relevant post, and opens the new Conversation Sidebar (see below) and workflow capabilities in your browser so you can decide how to process the post. You can receive alerts even when you’re not working in the dashboard, so you can respond to relevant posts right from your browser window. Once you’ve acted on an alert, you and your team members will be able to see the updated activity so everyone stays in the loop and informed.

Conversation Sidebar

Within the enterprise, listening is more than a linear process. Monitoring social media means not only hearing what’s being said about your brand, but understanding what to do with that intelligence once you have it. The new Conversation Sidebar enables you to have an internal conversation with team members about the post, and also provides you enhanced workflow and tracking capabilities for each post in your topic profile so you can track responses, and share knowledge across your team. When you click the hyperlink in your As It Happens email or IM to open the sidebar, you will be able to:

•    Assign posts to team members within your organization
•    Communicate with other team members internally to collaboratively answer questions or address issues
•    Classify the type of post: lead, inquiry, compliment, complaint, etc.
•    Manually rate the sentiment of an item (positive, neutral, negative)
•    Track engagement level (commented, closed, awaiting reply) and create an audit trail of responses and outcomes

The Conversation Sidebar will help enterprise teams scale their engagement or agency teams collaborate with their clients, coordinate their community outreach, and track and analyze their external conversations.

Source Tags

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 later, you might want to segment your data by those labels. Radian6′s new source tagging capability lets you do just that.

From the workflow mode of the River of News widget, or right inside the Conversation Sidebar from your 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. Later, create reports, graphs, and data segmentation in your analysis widgets sorted by those tags, or even focus your listening or analysis on these tagged groups. Want to know how customers in Chicago are driving buzz for you? Drill down into posts you’ve tagged with “customer” and “Chicago” and see, instantly.

Comment Indexing

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 is a 360 degree conversation, and tracking the path of conversation across the web – including through comments – is important to your business. Radian6′s comment indexing now includes post results gathered through our new integration with the comment indexing service Backtype.com (http://www.backtype.com) as well Radian6’s new comment crawling capability.

New Metric: Total Inbound Links from Google

Radian6 has always measured on-topic inbound links to your comments. Inbound links are an important indication of influence. Now, in your River of News, Influencer Widget, and Topic Analysis Widgets, you can find data that indicates the total number of inbound links (all links), according to Google, for a particular piece of content. Inbound links can give you an idea of a post’s overall popularity as well as how often it’s being shared across the web, whether it’s in direct relation to the topic you’re tracking, or whether it’s a piece of content being referenced in another discussion altogether.

Site Traffic Statistics from Compete.com

Radian6 users can also now elect to purchase Compete.com website traffic statistics into the influencer widget view. This allows you to merge traditional web analytics (monthly site views, monthly average time on site, unique monthly visitors, monthly unique sessions) with the social media analytics captured within the Radian6 platform and better analyze the popularity, influence, and traffic for the sources relevant to you.

Powerful New Analytics & Enhanced Content Segmentation

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.

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.

Your Topic Analysis results, by topic or keyword, can be counted and totalled by eight different conversation metrics including:
•    number of matching posts (volume)
•    number of total comments
•    total views for all videos/images
•    total votes for all on topic posts
•    sum of all Twitter followers
•    total on topic inbound links

•    total inbound links (off and on-topic)
•    number of unique sources

Want to know how many total comments your topic generated? Which topic generated the most Twitter impressions? Now you can see more than just post count for your topics, at a glance.

The real power in all of the new features is in their combined use. With enhanced workflow, As-It-Happens email and IM, powerful new metrics and analytics, and customized source tagging, you can create and set up a comprehensive listening grid for your enterprise to manage your entire social media outreach strategy and empower your team members to share, learn, and participate in a valuable way.

Twitter Metrics
You now have the ability to sort Twitter posts by Twitter metrics in the River of News widget. So you can now quickly and easily view Twitter conversations based on who has the most followers, friends and updates. Twitter profile pics now also appear with each tweet to make it easier to recognize people you may already know.

Forum Replies
Forum Replies are now tracked as their own media type, allowing you to now track forums at the thread level and/or at the individual reply level. You can set the media type at the Topic Profile level and also on the configuration panel on the widgets. In addition, Forum Replies is now included in the influence model – including the influencer EQ and the Influencer widget.

Forum Thread Size
In addition to being able to track Replies, you can also sort Forums based on thread size, allowing to see where the most active conversations are taking place that are mentioning your brand or topic of interest.

Streamlined River of News Sort Curtain
The sort curtain in River of News now has easy-to-use drop-down lists for selecting sort options and workflow filtering options. In addition, the new “thumb tack” on the far right of the curtains allows you to lock the curtain down for even quicker access to your sort and filtering capabilities.

Multiple Simultaneous Post Deletes
Open the sort menu in River of News, click and edit and the widget goes into edit mode allowing you to select multiple posts — even across pages in the River of News — and batch delete posts in a single click.

Additional Vote Metrics
In addition to the existing de.licio.us bookmarks and Digg.com vote metrics, we now include Reddit votes in the Vote metric.

The Mashup
Product and service innovation is key for any business to stay ahead of the curve. And your customers can be a gold mine of information for new and creative ways to use or adapt your product. If you’re paying close attention, you might be fortunate enough to find customers that have taken your product and done something new with it. For example, Ikea Hacker takes out of the box Ikea furniture and shares customers’ improvements, adaptations and fixes for bugs like a perpetually wobbly stool. Monitoring the web can bring your company ideas for new features or even new products, courtesy of your customers.

The Correction
It happens. An employee puts out incorrect information, a customer or vendor oversteps their relationship and represents themselves or their information as “official” when it might not be. Listening to the conversations happening online affords you the opportunity to hear this dialogue as it unfolds, and step in to correct information when needed as well as reestablish guidelines with the representatives working on your behalf. Preserving your brand equity online is critical, and filtering and correcting misinformation is a critical piece of doing so.

The Advocate
When a brand or company talks about their benefits, people might listen, but they also might be skeptical of the message. When an individual talks passionately about their love of a brand or product, or what a fan they are of a particular company, people take notice. That third party opinion is often viewed as more trustworthy, more genuine, or more objective. Tracking your brand across the web will help you and your company find your advocates – the people that may be singing your praises but whom you don’t yet know. Find them, thank them, encourage them, and use them as a resource to understand your true brand value through your customers’ eyes.

The Common Ground
Birds of a feather flock together, and so do brand enthusiasts, or people with common interests overall. If you’re in the travel industry, finding collections and communities of travel enthusiasts across the web makes your outreach and marketing efforts more direct, more personal, and more effective. Reaching customers where they congregate and starting a relationship based on mutual interests can rapidly build your network and create interest in your brand.

The Infringement
No one likes to play the heavy, but there are very real instances where a person or company may be infringing on the brand or intellectual property that you’ve worked so hard to build. Monitoring your brand across social media will allow you to uncover these instances and quickly decide on a path of resolution. Whether it’s a blog scraping your proprietary content or a website republishing your copyrighted information, you can choose how and where best to address the issues and engage the offenders for a quick solution.

The Long Tail
Influencers carry a lot of weight, but there are millions of people online at a given time. Passionate brand evangelists can be found in far reaches of the web, in smaller and more niche communities. Social networks, communities, and forums exist for the most specialized interests you can imagine, and monitoring social media closely is the best way to find them. There can be immense value in connecting with these small but passionate groups and giving them opportunities to get acquainted and connected with you and your brand. Connecting with “the long tail” can do wonders in raising the awareness of your brand within your target community.

The Story Angle
Looking at your brand and your industry from a single point of view can be limiting. Listening to how other people are telling stories about your product, company, or brand can uncover new and creative ways to talk about your business. You may uncover subtle trends in your industry or innovative ways of describing your work. The media and the readers of your blog will enjoy capturing a creative story that will help your brand stand out from the competition.

The Misstep
One of the challenges of participating in social media is giving up strict control of your messaging by allowing your community – internal or external – to participate in its creation. With that openness comes challenges, including employees who may mean well, but may be giving out misinformation. By paying attention to your brand mentions in social media, you can identify these potential missteps early and work with your teams to correct inaccuracies. You may also learn some valuable information about rumors, misconceptions, or incorrect information that’s been circulating through your internal networks so you can work to clarify and correct it.

The Recruit
More than likely, the first thing a potential employee will do when considering your company is do a Google search. Monitoring the web ensures that you’ll know what they’ll see and read before they do. And today’s talent market is incredibly tight in many industries, making great people the most valuable asset for many businesses. Listening carefully to discussion online in your industry can help you identify experts and standout talent that you may not find through traditional search channels.

The Brand Association
You’ve likely spent a great deal of time and money establishing your value proposition and brand positioning in the marketplace. But are your customers and potential customers viewing your brand through the same lens? By expanding your monitoring efforts to listen broadly across the web, you may capture tangential associations for your brand across new lifestyles, demographics, or cultures that you hadn’t previously considered. And if there are negative terms associated with your brand, discovering them will allow your company to address issues when needed and keep realistic awareness of overall brand perceptions for future planning.

Need even more reasons? Stay tuned tomorrow and I’ll publish yet another 5 reasons to monitor social media.

(photo credit – Stephen MacGillivray)

“The founders of Radian6, a New Brunswick software firm that helps its clients monitor what’s being said about them online, knew they had developed something good. But it was only when they targeted their product to one of the world’s largest public relations conglomerates that they scored their first big contract.”  For more on the story please visit the Globe and Mail.