Radian6 – Aggregating Opinion

I’ve long been a proponent of new web plays looking to find an offering that aggregate rather than create content. In this world there is no end of data available to us but what we lack is ways to aggregate that data, obtain analysis from it and, at the end of the day, derive insight from it.

Recently I met up with Ed Sullivan, Director of Strategic Alliances for  Radian6, and subsequently took the opportunity of taking a look at what they do. Radian6 is a social media monitoring, measurement & engagement company that seeks to bring their large, corporate clients a visibility into the aggregate opinion of their brand that the marketplace holds. They do this by providing a real time, and self service “listening platform” for monitoring, measuring and engaging in conversations online. They’ve managed to snare such high profile (and highly talked about) organizations as Dell, Comcast, The Home Depot and UPS.

The Radian6 solution is in three parts;

• Listening: Discovering real-time, relevant, impactful conversations
• Measuring: Monitoring, analyzing and tracking those conversations
• Engaging: Active dialog with customers and tracking/ tagging comments for further use

To paraphrase – aggregation, analysis and reaction. The Radian6 solution delivers real time data from all social media forums – blogs, twitter, video and image sharing sites, forums and the like. It aggregates and delivers this content via a web user interface with dashboards to assess the overall brand perception.

The screen shot below shows some analytics from a sample aggregation of mentions of the word “sermo”;

On the left are all the incoming feeds which can then be assigned to different operatives within the organization. Once a “contact” has created a topic relating to the organization, that contact then is tracked within Radian6 with subsequent communications being tracked back to the individual. A fresh contact can be assigned, prioritized and tagged to ensure it’s dealt with in a timely manner by the correct person. The right hand columns deliver some analytics around the organization – total posts, related keywords, sources etc.

Radian6 collect, in multiple languages, content from;

• Blogs
• Forums
• Online news
• Video sites
• Rich media sites – images
• Microblogging services
• Comments
• Social bookmarking services

Tellingly enough Dell is a user of all of Radian6’s offerings. Dell has long been held up as a best-practice example for social media utilization – they’ have a seemingly uncanny ability of picking up on the tone of the conversation and responding to it, at least at an aggregate level.

The screen capture below shows how a tweet can be added to an existing conversation from within Radian6, assigned to a user and classified;

While some might be a little worried by a service that would seem to fulfill the Orwellian Big Brother prophesy, the fact is that we all, as web users, leave breadcrumbs of opinion around the place – it’s an obvious play to aggregate that content and allow organizations to drive some insights from it.

All in all I like what Radian6 is doing – their value proposition for large companies is obvious, and given the caliber of companies using their services they’re doing a good job of delivering on their promise.

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