Q&A With Marcel Lebrun – Part One: Radian6’s New Features

Earlier this week I posted an analysis of new features that Radian6, a social media monitoring company, released over the last weekend. That same day Marcel Lebrun, CEO of Radian6, left a very lengthy but equally helpful comment on my post.

As a follow-up to that post, I had a chance to ask Marcel a few questions about the new features about Radian6 in general and about their plans on the future. The interview was quite long, so I’m splitting it into two posts.

Today: looking at Radian6’s new features.

Q: You released a lot of new features last weekend. They affect a lot of different areas of Radian6; which ones are you most excited about?

A: All of it!!  There are so many new things we can do with this platform now.   I am most excited about the power of these new features when used in combination to help companies (and their agencies) collaborate & scale their listening & engagement.   It really enables a company to effectively setup their “listening grid” in a way that can engage many parts of the company and facilitate easy collaboration amongst employees (and their consultants, agency partners, etc.). 

A lot of practical testing went into how we integrated workflow (conversation sidebar) into as-it-happens emails & IM and then how we enable this data to be sliced & diced in the dashboard.    

Even for a small company like us, we have become so dependent on this tool to coordinate & manage our own listening & engagement that we know it will be a hit.  Without it we would likely need 2-3 more headcount and I know we would have coordination issues (multiple people responding, stuff falling through the cracks, wasted/duplicated effort, lack of measurement, etc.).

Q: Your new “conversation sidebar” significantly enhances the workflow functionality within Radian6. Do you have any plans to enhance that further?

A: Yes, the conversation sidebar enhances workflow, and it also significantly enhances the ability to have internal conversations & collaboration around listening & engagement.  It enables what I like to call a “purpose driven” social network inside your company or between agency/client (the purpose being listening & engaging with customers). 

In terms of further enhancements, we are really looking to see what feedback we get from our customers on the sidebar and we will keep making it better.

Q: Any plans to extend IM functionality to Live Messenger?

A: Yes, we are looking into adding Live Messenger support as well.

Q: How do you see people using source tagging [a new feature] most effectively?

A: Source tagging is extremely powerful.  I like to think of it like the “calling line ID” of the social web.  Let’s say you see a mention of your brand, and one employee tags this person with “national account” and “customer ID#1234”.  In the future, every time this customer talks about you online, the content will carry these tags so that the information is available to everyone in your organization.  This saves effort and provides for smarter engagement.  Not only that, but you can setup different listening alerts tied to the tags. 

In this example, someone in the company could setup an alert to listen only to conversations/mentions from “national accounts”.   In the future we will be adding rules based on source tags (and we have the start of that today with tag based alerting).

Another powerful use of source tags is segmentation & measurement.  Imagine being able to understand the conversation pattern of only the particular customers who bought your new product?  How many of these existing customers first asked their network about your product prior to buying?  How long before the purchase and which ones did you engage with directly (versus others)?  

Use source tags in combination with our new segmenting features and you can segment by tag, then sub-segment by engagement type and quickly get answers to these questions.