Social Media Tool Review of Radian6

Our Communications Department had the opportunity earlier today to follow along in the Radian6 Dashboard Overview Training Webinar leading up to our pilot of the social media monitoring, measurement, and engagement program.

Here are the initial thoughts, observations, and items that jumped out at me as being significant from my perspective:

• One of the best examples of an intuitive layout for web design
• The ability to Search Media Types is impressive. They are pulling data for...
  
• Blogs - searching RSS feeds for titles and content
  
• Video - by tags, titles, and descriptions
  
• Images - by tags, titles, and descriptions
• Mainstream News Media - online sources
  
• Micromedia - FriendFeed and Twitter (but mostly Twitter)
  
• Forums - comments and replies powered by BoardReader.com
  
• Comments - powered by Backtype.com
  
• Source filters provides exact match using multiple search strings
  
• The query builder easy to use so it would be hard to screw up a Boolean search.
• Influencer EQ lets you exacly adjust what you consider to be an influencer versus other tools provided.
  
• The imagery of their "River of News" is extraordinary (so is its functionality)
• Real-time monitoring option or specific date range
  
• Keyword search
• Workflow option designed for active engagement and includes taffing results, audit trail, and the social profile for any source. (Loved this feature)
  
• Conversation Cloud visualization with color/size for keywords (the easiest thing to understand for those unfamiliar with aspects of social media)
• Widgets include Topic analysis and trends, New Influencers View (powered by compete.com), and vote count, which equals bookmarking on sites like delicious.com, Digg.com, and Reddit.com.
  

As we get further into this pilot I hope to have additional feedback to share on Radian6. I invite other users of Radian6 to share their thoughts via comments. I am trying to not be too "rah, rah" about this program since I haven't actually used it yet. (I am failing to stay objective.) However, from what I've seen so far, this program runs deep with potential for monitoring, measurement, and analytics and I look forward to jumping in.

Photo credit: Radian6

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