Dear Radian6,

We’ve been using Radian6 to monitor and respond to brand mentions and share our own content with our community. Now we’d like to start sharing more external content on our brand social media channels. Do you have any suggestions on how to incorporate this into our existing social strategy?

Dear User,

Sharing external content is a great way to provide your community with additional resources that they will find helpful, interesting, or just plain funny, and has the added benefit of taking some of the pressure off when it comes to creating original content. As well, posting content that others have created or shared helps strengthen existing relationships and attract new followers.

Here are some suggestions for how you can make finding and sharing external content a part of your daily monitoring and engaging.

Industry Conversation

If you aren’t already monitoring industry conversation, this is the perfect time to start. Put together a new keyword group with terms relevant to your industry so you can monitor it in a separate stack. Here, I’ve used keywords around restaurants and social media as an example.

You can also use the Topic Profile Trends stack in the engagement console to see at a glance what might be worth sharing with your own community.

Not only will it give you additional insight into industry trends, but there is ample relevant external content to share. Chances are your community members are interested in some of the same content you are, so this is your opportunity to fill that need and become a trusted resource.

Multimedia

Images and videos are always popular when it comes to content and will stand out in your followers’ social media feeds. Create a separate stack in the engagement console for mentions of your brand attached to videos and images.

Do the same for your industry conversation keyword group. You might find some hidden gems that your community will enjoy.

Source Filters

As you come across websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts that consistently share great content, consider creating a separate topic profile with source filters. To illustrate, I created the sample source filter below.

This will allow you to keep track of all your go-to resources within the engagement console, making it easy to share timely content with your community as a part of your daily brand engagement.

These are a few of the ways you can track and share external content as part of your social media strategy. We would love to hear from other brands. Have you used any of the above strategies to find valuable content for your communities? Do you have any other suggestions to add?

Being able to stay engaged in social media on the go is key for our customers and for us here at Radian6. That’s why we’ve updated our mobile application based on customer feedback. Let’s have a look at some of the new features!

Highlighted Keywords
It’s a feature many of our users will be familiar with and we’ve brought it over to our mobile application. Now in both your mobile stack and workflow page view you’ll notice that your keywords are highlighted in order to help you understand why a particular post was pulled in.

Searchable Topic Profile and Users Lists
If you have a large team or even just a small one with a need for efficiency, making it easier to find the topic profile or user you need is just our way of improving your mobile abilities.

Social Profile
Love being able to know who a person is before responding? We do too and that’s why now you’ll be able to tap a profile picture on a post to open the author’s social profile.

Open URL 
Did someone post a URL in a post that you need to research before responding? You now have the ability in workflow page view to tap the URL and open up that page in your browser.

Stack Improvements
To make navigating a breeze, we’ve added the ability to tap the top of screen to serve as a “go to the top of the stack” feature. Also, when you scroll to the bottom of the stack, it will automatically load more posts for you. Don’t worry about losing your spot because we’ve adjusted the “pull down to refresh” option. Now it requires that you hold for one second to avoid unintentional reloads. Want new items to automatically load for you? Just flip the stack off and select the new “Auto Add Posts” option.

For better or worse, the crew from MTV’s Jersey Shore has returned for their fifth season and fist pumped their way to 702,536 social media mentions on January 5^th, 2012 and 286,290 mentions during the shows’ airing. This crushed all shows on social that premiered new episodes last night. These numbers were arrived at by looking for all mentions of “Jersey Shore” and “#jerseyshore” between 12AM January 5, 2012 to this morning at 9:00AM Atlantic Standard Time.

To be perfectly frank, the numbers surprised me as the show returned the highest number of mentions that I’ve seen since I start following this data in September. To provide some context, I did a quick Google search to see if there were any articles indicating how many viewers tuned in Thursday night. Unfortunately, writing this article at this time there isn’t, however, the Season 4 premier in August 2011 netted an audience of 8.8 million viewers.

If one assumes that the viewership for last night’s season premier was similar it helps to put the 702,536 mentions in context.

I was still a little suspect of the numbers so I wanted to drill down a little further and find out how many “unique sources” were posting about Jersey Shore. This helps to understand how many individual accounts were tweeting about the show. Filtering by “unique source count” returned 348,832 individual accounts tweeting about the show’s premier Thursday night. Dividing the total number of mentions by the total number of unique sources equals an average of about two mentions per account. The numbers are definitely accurate.

Taking a peek at the social demographics of who was talking about Jersey Shore on social Thursday night the figures for age groups and gender are likely what you would expect.

With social numbers like this, there is a wealth of data to be mined. What did people like? What didn’t they like? What were the most discussed portions of the show? Which cast member generates the most conversations? How many conversations mention product placements?  The data is in there.

So what do you think of the numbers? What information would you be most interested in pulling out of the platform?

Guest blogger, David Shipley is a writer, digital content strategist and part-time MBA student at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. He is also a technology buff and used the Radian6 platform to develop this post.

Traditional marketing textbooks state there are four P’s central to marketing – Product, Price, Promotion and Place. A fifth P – packaging, is sometimes argued as being another essential part of the marketing mix.

But with the ever-increasing prominence and use of social media, it may be time to consider a sixth P. People.

Where the traditional view of marketing treats clients or customers as consumers of a particular product or target audiences for a brand, social media helps companies create relationships that bring customers into the business and makes them part of the brand.

Chris Brogan says, “Brands who are lagging in social media have more to do all the way around.”

Odds are if you’re into technology like I am, the latest and hottest technology toys – smartphones, tablets and eReaders, excite you. Using Radain6, here’s a chance to talk about the social media trends and marketing implications around the most popular products and brands on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and more.

Smartphones

The smartphone with the largest share of conversations between mid-November and mid-December was the Motorola Droid, with 57.7% of all conversations, followed closely by Apple’s iPhone with 41.8% of all conversations.

For both Motorola and Apple, a significant majority of the sentiment was positive.

Jeff Roach, founder of Sociallogical, a Canadian social media strategy and education firm, said the volume and passion of conversations about smartphones doesn’t surprise him. “There’s a ton of dialogue about these products everyday, it’s pretty remarkable.”

Roach notes that Motorola could leverage its lead in conversations to build greater awareness about its specific brand and products within the overall Android space.

Even Apple, which isn’t particularly active in social media, could benefit from community building activities, he adds. “Apple has built a community around its brand, and they’ve done it without social media, but I think it’s really going to be hard to continue to build that community, to feed that community, without using social media.”

Tablets

Apple did lead the charge regarding mentions in the tablet arena. The iPad was the clear winner, with more than 58.3% of all conversations, with second-place Samsung Galaxy nabbing 16.7%. Like smartphones, the sentiment for tablets was mostly positive.

Interestingly, those who like other tablets besides the iPad, seem to like them a lot, with sentiment more positive for the Galaxy tablet than for the iPad.

eReaders

For eReaders, if you weren’t the Kindle, you weren’t getting a whole lot of attention.   The Kindle was the focus of 96.4% of all conversations around eReaders.

But those who are competing against Amazon or considering entering the space shouldn’t lose hope, Roach says. “There’s a community around everything,” he notes, arguing that firms may be able to leverage social media to build communities around new products or services.

The value of measurement

According to Chris Brogan, there is value in measuring conversations around brands and products. “I can tell you from my very own personal experience in marketing and selling my own products and services that talk far outweighs action. Measuring percentage of conversation is good, for sure, insofar as it lets you know about awareness and the like, but I prefer to measure conversion.”

Do you think social media conversations influence product sales? How concerned should businesses be about their share of conversation?

David Shipley can be reached via Twitter or LinkedIn.

The Survivor: South Pacific finale aired Sunday night capping off the reality show’s 23^rd season. As with all seasons past there was no shortage of drama, personal conflict, and amazing feats of mental and physical endurance. In the end there can only be one Survivor and that honor went to medical student Sophie Clark from Willsboro, New York. Sophie beat out three-time contestant and fan favorite (at least my favorite) “Coach” Benjamin Wade and Albert Destrade.

Personally, Sophie didn’t make much of an impression on me in the beginning. It was very clear from the get go that Sophie was highly intelligent but I thought her quiet nature would end up seeing her voted out in the first couple of weeks. In that event that didn’t happen I figured she wouldn’t make it much past the merger. Last nights finale showed just how much I know!

As readers of my blog here at Radian6 know, I’ve spent much of the fall season charting the social statistics from this fall’s television line up. Compared to other shows from CBS Survivor has spent much of the season well behind the number of social conversations enjoyed by the network’s other programs. However, those that do tweet while watching Survivor comprise an extremely loyal fan base led by Jeff Probst himself who engages live during every broadcast.

Looking back over the whole season the social buzz for Survivor was fairly steady however after the premiere generated over six thousand mentions on Twitter those numbers would dip over the next four weeks. As you can see in the graph below, conversations increased at the midway point of the season and remained steady until the finale, which generated a total of 27,524 tweets.

There were a lot of conversations being carried out on Twitter last night but two in particular that generated a lot of focused and emotional reaction: the Survivor finalists and the confrontation between Brandon Hantz and his uncle Russell Hantz.

Of the Survivor finalists, Sophie edged out conversations related to Coach. Coach is a three-time contestant on Survivor and has been one of those characters fans of the show love to hate because of his goofy antics. This season Coach came back and toned him self down a bit but he was still a polarizing character that generated a lot of conversation during the finale.

If there was one contestant on Survivor: South Pacific that generated the most negative emotional reactions from viewers this season it was Brandon Hantz. Brandon is the nephew of three-time contestant and Survivor mega-villan Russell Hantz. Unlike his uncle Brandon proved to be a conflicted individual who relied heavily on his religious beliefs when things got rocky in the game. This had a polarizing effect and if you followed the #Survivor hashtag during the season you know that many people grew to dislike the younger Hantz about as much as they disliked his uncle Russell.

Even during the finale conversations around Brandon were pretty negative but that changed on a dime during the Survivor reunion broadcast.

The tweets above are examples of negative comments directed at Brandon, however they are far from the worst. People who disliked Brandon really disliked him and used language that we just can’t publish on our blog!!!

During the cast interviews Jeff asked Brandon how his family felt about his game and Brandon stated that he had been given a hard time and that no one from his family had bothered to come to the show to support him. Probst then went to the audience and pulled Russell out of the audience to ask him what he thought of his nephew’s time on Survivor. After initially saying that he wouldn’t critique Brandon’s performance unless his nephew gave him permission Probst pushed Russell who unleashed a really brutal summary of his nephew’s mistakes.

With that conversations changed from being about how much people disliked Brandon to an outpouring of sympathy for him.

The social web weighed in heavily during the finale. It was an extremely social event if you were watching the show and Twitter at the same time. It was also interesting to watch Russell and Brandon’s Twitter exchanges throughout the finale. Social media is definitely breaking down the fourth wall of television and this finale shows some of the ways that’s happening.

What did you think of Survivor: South Pacific? Do you live-tweet along with host Jeff Probst? Are you as excited as I am for Survivor: One World??!!

If you follow one or more of Radian6′s RSS feeds, we are introducing changes today. We’ve made these changes based on your feedback and our analysis on how people interact with our RSS feeds. We hope you will find these improvements useful.

The RSS Feeds for this blog (and the social strategy blog) will now be merged under http://feeds.feedburner.com/Radian6. If you subscribe to the current Platform blog feed, consider subscribing to the feed above as the standalone Platform blog feed will be ending.

Also, a new feed is being introduced that will feature the latest news from our website, including our Free Resources section. Subscribe to be the first to know when new videos, case studies, ebooks and products are added to the Radian6 fold. You can follow this feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Radian6Resources

Have questions? Let us know!

Dear Radian6,

We’ve been using the Radian6 platform for mentions of our health system’s brand name and for active engagement with our online community.  Are there any other ways to make use of social media monitoring that we may not have taken advantage of yet?

Dear User:

It’s great to hear that you are now engaging with your social media community and keeping a close eye on discussions surrounding your brand.  Health is topic of interest to just about everyone and it’s likely you’re getting plenty of mentions in the social space.  According to the latest research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 80% of internet users have looked online for health information.  Of particular interest to your question for us today, it should be noted that the most commonly researched topics are specific diseases or conditions followed by specific medical treatments and/or procedures.   The takeaway for your brand here is that the majority of online users are searching for discussions centered on disease states, not facilities or doctors, as their highest priority.  Taking this into consideration, how could you add to your listening strategy?

Since you’re actively monitoring for brand mentions already, you’ve no doubt set up your topic profile with all relevant keywords surrounding your hospital or health facility’s brand name.  Let’s take a look at how the Radian6 platform can be used to pull in conversations surrounding specific disease states and conditions, perhaps those that happen to be specialties at your facility.

We’ll start by selecting the Keywords and Keyword Groups tab and the ‘Choose a Group Type’ option, making certain to classify this new group of words as Industry rather than Brand-centric.  Keep in mind, depending on how many specialties your facility deals in, this may necessitate setting up a brand new topic profile to thoroughly track all of those disease specific conversations.

Get a Snapshot of your specialty’s discussions

For simplicity, let’s say our facility specializes in only endocrine disorders. We might like to take a look at diabetes and the conversations surrounding it.  Let’s start with a conversation cloud and a look at the top 50 words used in conjunction with diabetes in the discussions we’ve pulled in within our topic profile.

If any words stand out, we can pull up a River of News directly from that word and see all the posts containing that word.  For example, let’s grab the conversations using the word ‘study’ in conjunction with diabetes.

Making New Connections

Since you’ve already begun using the Engagement Console to engage with your facility’s community, you can incorporate this new industry coverage into your engagement strategy.  You may find this opens up new conversations and new community members that were not previously on your radar.  Perhaps there is a doctor on the opposite side of the country who’s sharing a ton of great diabetes information through Twitter and his/her blog, you just hadn’t picked up on it since your monitoring to this point was centered solely on brand mentions.  Voila, industry monitoring has opened up new potential contacts and collaborators that may have floated along outside your view until now as you focused more on engaging with your local community.

Share of Conversation

Your share of conversation is a key metric to keep an eye on if you are interested in your brand’s impact and growth within that particular area of study.  By using a topic analysis widget we can have a look at how often our Brand is mentioned in the overall conversation about diabetes.

First we’ll include a keyword group for the industry (diabetes)

Next, we’ll compare it to a keyword group for our Brand (e.g. Your hospital: Note I am using a fictional brand name for display purposes only.)

Now we’ll use our topic analysis widget to see how our hospital fares in the online conversations surrounding diabetes.

As we can see, Boies Memorial Hospital is mentioned in only 2.5% of online diabetes conversations.  Not bad for a fictional hospital, mind you.

Increase Your Share of that Conversation

Now that you’ve gotten a glimpse at where you stand vs. your industry, you may wish to track your share of conversation each week/month as your online engagement continues.  Consider where your brand can add value to the disease specific conversations that are important to the online health community.  Contribute helpful content and commentary where you see fit.  You can ask questions designed to better understand the community’s needs and deepen your learning about diabetes patients.  Be sure to take a regular look at your conversation share to see if your hospital or facility is becoming more intertwined with the online discussion of the specific specialty or topic  you wish to be associated with.

Have you launched a disease specific social media campaign recently?  Have you tracked your share of conversation before and after this campaign? Have you had success finding new online contacts by broadening your monitoring to include industry terms?  Tell us all about it in the comments section!

With the introduction of social media, marketing and PR campaigns have become more interactive than those carried out over traditional channels alone, such as television and print. Brands can monitor and engage with their fans and followers in real time and assess the success of their campaigns almost immediately. This changing landscape means that keeping organized and responding to mentions in a timely manner is extremely important. In the spirit of this month’s eBook, let’s look at a few ways you can use the engagement console to manage your social media campaigns more effectively.

Manage your social media accounts

Social media campaigns can focus on a single brand channel or be integrated across several. Through the engagement console, you can manage both your brand’s Facebook and Twitter accounts within the same application. You can also manage multiple Twitter accounts, if necessary.

This allows you to respond to comments and questions from your fans and followers, as well as outpost your own content.

When promoting your campaign, you might use both Facebook and Twitter to get the word out. The engagement console also allows you to outpost to multiple channels simultaneously, making managing your campaign outreach more efficient.

Plan your workflow

Before you launch your campaign, determine the post tags and source tags you will apply in the engagement console (you can build off of your brand’s existing playbook for this) and that you will use to assess your campaign’s results come reporting time. Create a unique post tag for your campaign (here, we used “campaignXYZ”) to identify mentions. This can be combined with existing source tags you might have, such as advocate, customer, influencer, etc.

Focus your efforts

When tracking your campaigns, you will most likely get mentions across several media types. Whether you have one person managing your campaign engagement or many, you can focus your efforts to make your mentions more manageable. One way to prioritize is to dedicate separate stacks to different media types. For example, since Twitter mentions require a shorter response time than blogs or other media types, dedicate a stack solely to Micromedia so you can track and respond to them easily. You can also have one stack dedicated to Mainstream News mentions to see what kind of media coverage your campaign is receiving.

In addition to prioritizing by media type, you can use a Topic Profile Trends stack to identify what topics are trending around your campaign. Just remember that the Topic Profile Trends will work best if you have a topic profile dedicated to your campaign rather than a keyword group set up within a larger topic profile. Here, we can see the topics currently trending around Small Business Saturday, which we covered in last Friday’s post.

Monitor sentiment

In addition to media type and trending topics, you might also want to prioritize mentions around your campaign based on sentiment, which is the overarching mood or tone of the post. If you have a topic profile set up around your campaign, be sure to include sentiment subjects in your configuration.

You can then filter your mentions in the engagement console by sentiment and engage with them in real time. Filter by negative sentiment to see where your campaign is missing the mark or filter by positive sentiment to identify your advocates.

Social media campaigns require a coordinated effort when it comes to promoting, listening, and engagement. The above suggestions are some of the ways you can use the engagement console to streamline your interactions with fans and followers, prioritize posts, and keep a finger on how your campaign is being received.

Are you currently leveraging the engagement console for your online campaigns? Are there any other use cases you find valuable for your campaign management that we didn’t cover in this post? Feel free to share!

Are you a to-do list junkie? Do you have sticky notes plastered across your computer monitor? Like many of us in this immediate response world, you may need a way to track all the tasks that are waiting for your input. Think of the My Tasks stack option in the Engagement Console just like your social media response to-do list. We recently made some changes to the functionality of this stack, so let’s cover off on the basics of setting up a My Task stack, what type of posts you’ll find within such a stack, and then we’ll move into some best practices around using it.

How do I build my To-do List Stack?
A My Tasks Stack has it’s own icon a the top of the Engagement Console    that you will need to click to open up a new My Tasks Stack.

When you open up a new stack, this is what you’ll see. Let’s walk through what the options mean.

Stack Topics (Optional)
You do not need to select a topic profile here, but you can if you wish to limit the view of posts to one specific topic profile or multiple topic profiles.

Real Time Monitoring (Refresh Rate)
This will be how often the stack refreshes to show any new posts that have been assigned to you.

Media Types
Just like with any stack you can limit the posts you see by Media Type.

Sort By
Choose whether you’d like to see the oldest posts assigned to you or newest posts assigned to you first.

Filter By
All Content: Shows all posts
Post Tag/Queue: Shows post with a specified post tag
Source Tag: Shows post with a specified source tag

Highlight Keywords
If you want to search the posts assigned to you for specific keywords, enter them here.

Posts per Page
Decide how many posts show in your stack.

**Tip: You may notice that there used to be many more Filter By options and this used to be where you had to select “My Tasks”, we’ve recently made updates to this Stack to give users more functionality. The stack will now always pull posts assigned to you, no need to select that Filter option.

How do I build this in one step?
If you prefer to have a Default view of your My Tasks stack, (this will pull every post assigned to you across all topic profiles & media types) visit the Radian6 tab of your Preferences dialog box (File –>Preferences) to select the “Automatically launch My Tasks stack with Default configuration. With this box selected whenever you select the My Tasks stack button , the stack will automatically be created for you.

What should I be seeing in this stack?
As the name suggests, a My Tasks stack will only show you the items that are assigned to you. Whatever user you login as will also be the user that all the posts are assigned to. If you have no items in your stack, congratulations your social to-do list is complete! If you have items that you need to remove from this stack, simply change the engagement level to reflect the status of the post.

Tip: There are 3 engagement levels that will cause a post to close and be removed from your My Task Stack: “Reviewed, Closed, No Engagement Required”, “Resolved, No Further Action Required”, “Commented, Closed”. 

How do I use this stack to make my days easier?
So what’s the best way to use this stack? Here are a few ways we’ve used it.

Manage Your Items
Keep track of all posts that you are being tasked with and ensure you have given them each a proper response or actions.

Tracking open items
By not closing posts, you’re able to keep going back to an ongoing issue or something that needs in depth research.

Escalation
If you have senior members on your team assigning posts to them versus having them watch the overall feed can be the perfect way to escalate issues.

What ways do you use your My Tasks stack? What ways would help you to understand how to use this better? Do you have any questions around new functionality?

Dear Radian6,

As a retailer, we monitor social media conversations around our brand and engage with our customers on a regular basis. Now we’re looking to expand our efforts into the broader conversation around the retail industry, especially with the holiday season in full swing. Do you have any pointers for us?

Dear User,

With Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday behind us, we’ve already seen how retailers and consumers are using social media to discuss, influence, and determine purchasing decisions. There is valuable insight to be gained by listening to these conversations that can benefit your retail brand, including:

• Identifying points of need among consumers

• Seeing which retail brands are getting the most mentions

• Determining your industry influencers

Let’s look at the social media conversation around Small Business Saturday to illustrate the above points.

Find the Right Words

Here’s a quick peek at the keywords I chose to include in my topic profile:

Since we are looking at a very specific topic, I included “Small Business Saturday” as well as several hashtags being used around the event. However, if you are looking at more general conversations, you can use proximity to refine your results. For example, let’s say you want to narrow in on retail conversations around Christmas. While including “Christmas” on its own might pull in hundreds of thousands of mentions unrelated to the retail industry, adding additional keywords such as “shopping” and using the proximity feature will allow you to pull more relevant mentions.

Pinpoint Point of Need Conversations

Consumers are constantly turning to their social networks for opinions and recommendations when it comes time to make purchasing decisions, but they won’t always reach out to brands directly, especially if they’re not even aware of you. Stay one step ahead by proactively searching for point of need conversations to engage in.

To find these conversations around Small Business Saturday, at the widget level, let’s enter some phrases that consumers might use when looking for recommendations.

By opening up a River of News from the Topic Trends, we can identify consumers who are looking for specific items and suggestions on what stores they should shop at, or sharing their plans around Small Business Saturday. These are perfect opportunities for retail brands like yours to engage in a helpful and friendly tone. You already know that these consumers are excited about Small Business Saturday, so use that as a jumping off point. “We’re excited about Small Business Saturday too! Have fun today!” would be a great way to start a conversation.

Find Your Competitors

Monitoring industry conversation is the perfect way to see which retail brands are getting the most mentions and give you a better idea of your competitors. In the case of Small Business Saturday, where people are aiming to shop local, incorporating location keywords at the widget level, such as city names or states, will give you more relevant results. For example, let’s put in “shopping” and “Chicago” to find conversations specific to that city around consumers’ shopping plans on Small Business Saturday.

By opening up a River of News, we can see which Chicago retailers are getting mentioned.

Radian6 insights can also give you valuable information on which retail brands appear most frequently in industry conversations on Micromedia. By looking at the most mentioned usernames around Small Business Saturday, we see that Etsy received a significant number of mentions. Kramerbooks also appears as a result of President Obama’s well-publicized visit to the Washington, D.C. bookstore.

Identify Industry Influencers

Just as your retail brand has influencers, there are also people that influence the industry conversation. We already covered the Usernames Mentioned insight above, which is a great way to identify Micromedia influencers. You can also look at Retweeted Usernames to see which Twitter users have the most amplification. Here, we have the most retweeted usernames around Small Business Saturday.

Finally, you can use the Influencer Widget to identify influencers by media type. Since most of the conversation around Small Business Saturday occurred on Micromedia, let’s view the influencers for that media type specifically. Whether you want to engage with these users or just listen to what they have to say, your brand will benefit from knowing who is directing the conversation.

These are just a few of the ways you can broaden your listening scope to find opportunities for engagement and identify competitors and influencers in the retail industry. For the retailers out there, what are some other ways you are monitoring industry conversations? Did you focus your listening efforts on conversations around Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday? Why or why not?

Zoë Geddes-Soltess is a Community Engagement Specialist at Radian6, with a focus on Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail. You can follow her on Twitter at @zodot.