Brand Monitoring With Radian6

The very first step in your social media strategy should be
to start listening. Listening to what people are
saying online about your brand, products, services, and
competitors. Based on these results you can further work out
your social media strategy within your company.

A variety of tools are available to start
listening; free and paid tools. Jurgen
investigated which of the free tools you could use best. I
recently had a chance to try out 2 licensed tools: Radian6 and
Buzz developed by Meltwater.

In this post I will share my experience with Radian6. A post
about Meltwater’s Buzz will be published next week.

I Like…

Setup – Setup is fairly easy and if
you have any difficulties a detailed help feature – including
video’s – is available. After setting up the keywords, results will
be streaming in quickly.

Campaigns – A campaign – a search on specific keywords
– can also include relations between keywords. You are able to see
your mentions in comparison to your competitors’ for example.

Managing your flow – All social mentions will
be coming in on a central location from which you can assign
it to others, attach workflow, run reports, or analyze
trends. From the dashboard on – single point of
contact – you can work your way down unlike other freemium
tools which are more scattered over the place.

Ready to engage – From high level analyses
(geographical mentions in a specific time frame for example) you
are able to zoom in to individual mentions and engage directly
- if necessary obviously. It can connect to your Social CRM
(SalesForce.com) system to enrich your customer data or immediately
create a support issue for your support department to pick up.

Segmentation – Segment your results down to media
type (blogs, comments, forums etc.), sentiment (if you use a
supported language) and keywords, to further analyze social
mentions.

Reports – From all widgets and dashboard
data you can create reports on the fly or have them send to
you.

I Don’t Like…

Language support – Radian6 doesn’t support Dutch. This
will make the sentiment analyses a tougher job. In general you
should be aware that using automatic sentiment analyses only covers
20% of the job; its other 80% is manual labor.

Blocking sites  – Due to lack of Dutch language
support I received irrelevant content. I included “CDA”
(a Dutch political party) in my campaign and by this received lots
of unrelevant Spanish content. There is no easy way in blocking
this content.

Geographical data – Geographical data is collected
based on IP addresses of various services. Since platforms like
Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com are mostly hosted in the
United States you are unable to filter data from this geographical
area.

So…

It’s a pricy tool; it starts at $500 per month
for 10,000 mentions. Most of the results will also popup with
freemium tools. On the other hand, these tools are scattered all
over, and you won’t be able to apply workflow so easily nor do
detailed analyses or receive reports. If your organization has
thousands of mentions, and you are figuring out how and who
should handle this, Radian6 might be what you are looking
for.

Remember these are just tools, their success
depends on the way you use them.

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