Last week I had the pleasure of attending and participating in Social 2011, the first ever Radian6 User Conference. I’m happy to report it was a smashing success, on many levels. Don’t jump to conclusions, this wasn’t an analyst / data geek event. While social listening platforms like Radian6 are certainly used by these roles, this conference targeted marketing executives, strategists, brand managers and community managers as well. It was a terrific blend of practical know-how, detail combined with strategy and insights for operationalizing social business. Radian6 spent time announcing some big news, and launching new products that enable putting social business to work more easily. The event also included stellar keynotes from Mitch Joel and Paul Greenberg in particular, along with informative and entertaining panels (the panel I was on about ROI turned into some heated debate) through the day. To give you an idea how active and enthusiastic the crowd was, in the 2 days that the event spanned, there were over 15,000 mentions on Twitter using the #social2011 hashtag.The main highlights of course centered around product news about the Radian6 platform. Let’s take a quick look at them and the impact they will have.
Insights Platform – Radian6 launched a full blown insights engine. It extracts more relevant meaning from the mountains of social data that are harvested via social listening. Instead of being limited to knowing share of voice or total volume(s) of relevant conversation, one can now easily (with a click or two) drill-down into the data on a relevant topic and get much more granular, to answer very specific questions about sub-topics, themes, etc… on a given bit of conversation. I’d never do it justice in a paragraph or two, so take a look at the product overview video found here, as it will surely impress.
Why is this significant? For 2 primary reasons. The first being, it gets decision makers the answers they need quickly. Historically, to get to the answers the insight engine will spit out, one was required to do a lengthy bit of many searches/profiles, just to find the relevant data, then manually analyze it as well. The second reason? Efficiency. The insights engine will save significant amounts of time and energy to get key marketing, customer insights and customer support questions answers. In the era of the real-time organization, this capability will fast become the norm, not an advantage. Think table-stakes.
Summary Dashboard - The summary dashboard is an another new product, and attempts to provide an easy to digest, high-level view of a brand’s entire social footprint. It pulls key information from several parts of the Radian6 platform, and brings them to the user in beautiful, data cubes (built in HTML5, say goodbye to the Flash!). The types of information that you can get from the summary dashboard are conversation volume, overall sentiment, key audience demographics, influencer and content/topic analysis. This is significant again for the efficiency gains. It’s simply a better way to view important information over the previous alternative, which was to construct much of this manually via the widget gallery, which can be time-consuming and tedious.
Enterprise Engagement – This product announcement may not be relevant to all, but for those that are not only doing social listening and analysis, but also response and engagement, the expanded engagement console is a worthy consideration. It now offers full access to the social web. Respond to customers in Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, etc… It also comes with expanded workflow and notifications, team management capabilities, and an extensible widget gallery. That’s right, 3rd party developers can now build specialized plug-ins for the engagement console. An example shown at the event was the Klout plug-in added to the engagement console, enabling one to view an integrated Klout score for each author contained in the conversation results.
Mobile – One thing that’s always been missing from social listening platforms is a good mobile app, to easily monitor events and pull of key information. Not anymore. Radian6 launched their first mobile app for the iPhone (video overview at this link), available soon in iTunes. Before dismissing the relevance of this, consider the end user. This isn’t meant for analysts that need to get neck deep in the data, but for those company representatives on the front lines, as a means to always be in touch with what’s happening, and have the capbilities to respond. This is an extension of the real-time organization concept I described above.
Key Observation: The critical and growing 3rd Party Ecosystem tied to social listening success. While impressive and capable, Radian6 didn’t achieve these innovations alone. They spent time discussing how imperative it is for them, going forward, to identify the right specialized partners, and integrate partner technologies and capabilities into the platform, rather than develop it internally. There were 3 partners brought on-stage at the event to describe their integration and benefits. Radian6 has made substantial increases in their text analytics, semantic analysis, and influencer analysis by adding OpenAmplify, ThomsonReuters OpenCalais and Klout technologies to their platform. They hinted these 3 were only the beginning, and they were more to come in the future. This places Radian6 in a position to do what they do best, focus on great data coverage and customer support. Then integrate the best of breed specialists into the mix for analysis.
A few more items. The conference was incredibly well organized and run. There wasn’t a single snafu or hiccup that I can recall. This means the folks at Radian6 responsible for organizing the event worked their tails off, and I’m happy to give them the kudos their deserve. This means people like Lauren Vargas, Cory Hartlen, and Craig Comeau to name a few. I’m sure there are about a hundred others I’ve missed but please know I appreciated everything!
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