Posts Tagged ‘Radian6’

A Closer Look At The New Radian6 Engagement Console Features

10.11.17

Earlier this week I posted a review of some new features Radian6 has incorporated into its online dashboard. Today we’ll take a look at some additions rolled-out to their Engagement Console tool.

The changes to functionality are four-fold:

  1. Extensibility
  2. User roles and permissions
  3. Improved search functionality
  4. Shared macros

Extensibility

The latest version of the console allows developers to build new extensions into the console through the Engagement Console API. This might take the form of additional commands, built-in searches, or web pages pulled into new windows.

User roles and permissions

One of the new changes I touched on in the last post was the addition of “Super User” roles. Super users have an additional screen in Radian6′s online dashboard where they can see users and profiles, and edit each.

The inclusion of Super User functionality in the Engagement Console brings with it the ability to define “workspaces” and “permissions” for other users.

Workspaces

Workspaces are the areas where the stacks (columns) in the consoles are displayed. Super Users can set the base Workspaces for sets of users so, for example, certain users would always see certain topic profiles in their console.

Permissions

Permissions let you control how the console is configured for other users. As Ryan Strynatka, Director of Product Management, put it to me:

“You can turn various components and capabilities on and off.  For example, want to remove the ability to launch a personal FB stack and restrict the ability to respond on Twitter stacks – you can now do that.  In fact, you can completely pare down the EC you so that it looks and feels more like a desktop widget – just content flowing in without workflow capabilities and so forth.  In the Agency world, this might be interesting for routing content to customers.”

Improved search functionality

The new console incorporates three new elements into the existing search functionality:

  1. Creation of topic stacks by keyword group: allowing more targeted search results to be displayed (you could, for example, focus in on company and brand mentions rather than broader industry conversation).
  2. Filtering of search results by custom date: a very useful feature, especially for people working on social media audits and reports after the fact – in the past the lack of this feature rendered the console largely unusable for this purpose.
  3. Twitter profile search: Improved integration with Twitter allows you to quickly search for Twitter user names and have user profiles pop up within the console. Useful for folks engaged in real-time monitoring.

Macro sharing

Right from the beta version of the Engagement Console, the inclusion of easy-to-create macros has been a winning feature, allowing users to easily recreate previously time-consuming tasks, and apply them to multiple posts, with the click of a button.

With the new version of the console, you can now share your macros with other members of your team, or with members of specific projects – bringing a new element of consistency to macros which might otherwise be intimidating for less-advanced users.

Summary

When I first reviewed the Engagement Console earlier this year, it provided an excellent tool for engagement from an end-user perspective. These recent changes add additional benefits from the user side, but also from an enterprise viewpoint.

All-in-all, this is a very useful set of changes. Combined with the enhancements to the Radian6 dashboard, this represents a useful step forward for Radian6 which benefits both end users and enterprise administrators alike.

What would you like to see?

The Radian6 team will undoubtedly keep rolling-out adjustments over time. So, what other changes would you like to see?

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring, tools

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Earthquake: Canadians Turn to Social Media Instead of Diving for Cover

10.06.24

Yesterday afternoon at 1:41pm EDT, a 5.0 magnitude earthquake shook Quebec and Ontario and it looks like people ran to Twitter instead of diving for cover. Once again, social media beat traditional media to the punch (as if this is news nowadays), although mainstream outlets were quick to report the news shortly thereafter.

We did a little research on social media activity regarding the earthquake using Radian6. Some interesting stats:

  • Prior to the earthquake, there were approximately 100-300 mentions of earthquakes on social networks per hour.
  • There were over 31,000 mentions of earthquakes between 1 and 2pm today. That number doubled to almost 65,000 mentions in the hour following the earthquake (between 2 and 3pm).
  • There have been roughly 170,000 mentions of the earthquake since the earthquake began.
  • The first tweet was posted just seconds after the earthquake began at 1:41:41 EST.
  • Users generally decided to tweet the news rather than update their Facebook statuses. While many Facebook updates are private, publicly available updates were outnumbered by tweets by about 8 to 1.

While a majority of the tweets and updates were tinged with surprise, it’s nice to know people hadn’t lost their sense of humour. A few of the funnier posts on Twitter included:

  • “The earthquake triggered a tsunami at the G20 fake lake” – @AndrewFstewart
  • “The earthquake in Toronto was just thousands of England fans jumping back on the bandwagon” – @mlse
  • “That wasn’t an earthquake. It was just Quebec trying to separate.” – @stevepayne
  • “Widespread disappointment across Toronto at news that it was not, in fact, the epicentre of the quake” – @ivortossell
  • “So #earthquakes actually improve the TTC. Go figure. RT @680News: TTC fully operational.” – @josephdee

Erin Bury has a great post on some other funny tweets over at BlogTO.

This is another example of the power of social media in providing up-to-the second news in a way that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

Update: Interesting post from Joe Boughner on whether it really matters that social media beat the mainstream media to the punch. My take: I like Joe’s points, and Twitter certainly plays a different role to mainstream journalism – it’s not about substantial coverage in the same way. However, in a world where traffic (and ad dollars) flows to the first piece of substantial coverage on the event, being first does matter.

Posted in: social media, Thornley Fallis Communications

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Radian6 Launches Real-Time Monitoring And Engagement Console

10.03.10

Radian6 has announced a new tool that has the potential to be a paradigm shift in how companies manage their social media monitoring programs.

The Radian6 Engagement Console combines two of the best tools out there – Tweetdeck and Radian6 – in an Adobe Air-based desktop tool. In doing so, the console makes radical improvements to the workflow process for Radian6 users. We’ve been test-driving the console in our office for a little while now, and I’ve been very impressed by the utility – and future potential – of this new tool.

The Low-Down

Some of the key features of the console:

  • Supports multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook, so you can combine your personal and professional engagement – posting and replying on both of these services
  • Allows you to set up “stacks” (as they call columns) from multiple Radian6 profiles, based on numerous criteria
  • Incorporates Radian6′s search functionality, pulling from searches covering blogs, Twitter, Google Buzz, forums, Flickr, YouTube and more
  • Far, far faster than the Radian6 web interface – both in terms of interaction but also refresh frequency, which can be as frequent as every 30 seconds
  • Supports conversation threading – a feature missing from Radian6 previously
  • Built-in URL shortener
  • Allows team-wide collaboration on engagement, as you can see updates from colleagues in near-real time and can view previous conversations with people
  • Resizeable columns (hear that, Tweetdeck??)
  • Incorporates all of Radian6′s workflow features within the tool
  • Allows you to create custom macros for bulk management of posts.

Check out Radian6 CEO Marcel Lebrun discussing the console in this video:

Workflow At Your FingerTips

These last two features are central to the console’s value. One of the biggest barriers to using the full potential of the Radian6 workflow has, in the past, been the slow speed of the web interface and the 15-minute refresh cycle within that interface. This, combined with the preference people for tools such as Tweetdeck for their own personal posts, makes it hard to ensure that messages all flow through one system from a workflow perspective. This all changes with the Engagement Console.

The Engagement Console is intended for use as a front-line tool. In contrast, the Radian6 web interface is built much more around its reporting functionality. By taking the popular layout of Tweetdeck, building-in Radian6 data and workflow, and also essentially co-opting many of the features that have made tools like Hootsuite and CoTweet popular for team-based approaches recently, Radian6 is releasing a tool that has the potential to dramatically ease the monitoring and engagement process for companies.

Of course, the web interface remains for report generation purposes – this tool is intended as an addition, not a replacement.

Macros are your friend

The macro feature is another very cool addition. Macros aim to streamline your interactions by letting you automate recurring tasks. So, if you have a type of post that frequently comes up, you can set a standard way of dealing with them, save it as a macro and then click one button to handle all of that post’s workflow actions.

Confusing? Imagine a macro for product complaints, for example. You could create a macro that sets sentiment to ‘negative’, sets the post classification to ‘product complaint’, adds a post tag of “support” and assigns posts to a particular team member. Then, when future complaints arise, you can click the macro and all of that is taken care of in one click.

Bottom line

The Radian6 Engagement Console really could be a game-changer in their market. It combines the powerful search, workflow and team functionality of Radian6 with an easy-to-use interface which is a front-line person’s dream come true. Given all of the relatively similar social media monitoring services out there, this tips the balance. Once this tool rolls out fully (it’s in private beta until April), I see no reason why companies looking for both social media analytics and real-time engagement wouldn’t choose Radian6.

Now, where’s that mobile app…?

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring, tools

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Scaling Issues In Social Media Monitoring

09.09.09

Radian6 recently introduced a few new features to its social media monitoring platform. The company  explained them well on the Radian6 blog so I won’t go into details, but in a nutshell:

  • You can change font sizes on widgets
  • You can segment trend charts by media type, language and region
  • You can now copy and move reporting widgets between dashboards and users

These are minor changes for a product that is constantly evolving. The first change is very minor and the second is a step in the right direction. The third, however,  signals a continued trend of Radian6 offering features designed to improve collaboration among teams.

Volume and coordination are big challenges for large companies. As more and more large companies adopt social media, workflow features are becoming increasingly crucial to this kind of tool.  For social media monitoring to make it at an enterprise level, tools like Radian6 need to continue to add features that deal with scale.

In the meantime, here are five tips for scaling your listening:

  1. Sampling – when large volumes of discussion mean that reviewing every search result is completely unfeasible, consider sampling a percentage of posts. If there are 500 a day, perhaps you look at 50 or 100 of them. Statistically, you should get an accurate sample.
  2. Rank by influence – most of the major social media monitoring tools offer ways to rank or sort posts by various measures of influence. You may consider ‘skimming’ the most influential posts from the top of the pile, and dealing with those that have traction before moving through the list.
  3. Automation – I’m resistant to automated analysis, especially around sentiment (the English language is so complex), but in cases of massive scale, there may be no alternative but to allow some level of automation.
  4. Workflow - processes are helpful within organizations of any size, but within large organizations they are critical. Lay out who is responsible on given days or at given times; what the process is for monitoring and (if necessary) responding; a triage process to help determine what requires action; all of the decision points that arise through the process. It can drastically cut the time needed to deal with individual online discussions.
  5. Pull Together a Team - at a certain point, you can no longer do it all yourself. Check out Amber Naslund’s excellent ebook on building a social media team for a fantastic resource on how to pull together the resources you need to scale up.

How have you dealt with scaling issues in social media monitoring? What other features would you like to see in monitoring tools to make that scaling easier?

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring

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A Quick Social Media Analysis Of The Toronto Storm

09.08.21

If you lived anywhere in Southern Ontario or were paying attention online last night, you’ll likely know that the Toronto area experienced a brief but violent storm early yesterday evening. What made Torontonians sit up and notice was the dozen or so tornado warnings issued for the area as the storm rolled in.

For a while, the words “Toronto” and “Tornado” trended on Twitter as people relayed news and their tales of the storms.

Here’s a video of the storm rolling-in across Toronto (you may want to turn your speakers down):

Jim Parsons also has several fantastic photos.

I pulled together a brief analysis of events as they unfolded during last night’s episode, using Radian6 and a couple of other tools. It’s quick and dirty but, well, that’s what you get for free :)

Timing

As weather stations forecast the storm earlier in the day, there was a brief spike in conversation in the morning. Conversation related to the tornadoes themselves began to erupt around 6pm – the first time that, had you been paying attention to conversation trends, you would have noticed a trend evolving.

Another noticeable feature is the second spike in conversation later in the evening. The storm was well away from Toronto by this point; this spike represented people discussing their experiences and posting photos and videos they had collected during the episode.

Volume trend for 'Tornado' and 'Storm'

Volume and velocity

Once the storm began, the velocity of the spike in conversations was significant. We saw an immediate 66% increase in the volume of conversations about Toronto; at the height of the conversation (once the storm had passed, funnily enough), the volume represented more than a 125% increase in the converastion about Toronto.

Meanwhile, from one or two posts an hour about Toronto and storms or tornadoes, we saw an increase to roughly one post per minute during the storm, and two posts per minute in the aftermath.

Trend of Toronto and storm-topic keywords

Media Types

Not surprisingly, with Twitter being the golden child of the moment, especially for time-sensitive updates, micromedia comprised almost three-quarters of the conversation relating to tornadoes. Blogs made up 13 per cent, while images captured by people comprised 10 per cent of the conversation.

This is a substantial departure from the day as a while, during which nearly 40 per cent of the conversation about Toronto occured on blogs and a similar amount occurred on Twitter. A useful reminder that while Twitter is high-profile, on a day-to-day basis much conversation happens elsewhere.

Putting the storm into perspective over the course of the day gives an interesting slant to things. While it’s headline news today and was during the night, mentions of the storm and of tornadoes comprise a small segment of the conversations regarding Toronto yesterday. Despite the storm, discussion around the Jays/Sox game garnered almost as much overall discussion.

What are your memories of the storm?

Posted in: monitoring, social media

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Social Media Monitoring – Disturbing Or Useful?

09.04.08

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a thought-provoking post today over at Read Write Web, looking at social media listening platforms like Radian6 and their role in companies’ online outreach.

I found Marshall’s take surprising. Talking about his experience with Comcast representative ComcastBill responding to one of his tweets, he says:

“An extensive machinery of tracking, delegation and analysis stood between Bill and my little Tweet. Maybe it has to be that way, maybe it’s a good thing – but there’s something deeply disturbing about it too.”

Marshall also uses several phrases throughout his post that raise the question of whether services like Radian6 are somewhat creepy:

  • “There’s something that feels condescending about these kinds of services. Why can’t the marketers using them learn how to use the web, like the rest of us have?”
  • “It looks like it’s just you and them, but behind them there’s a curtain covering a whole mess of cogs and pulleys, analyzing you in different ways.”
  • “It’s kind of a modern day horror story, isn’t it? Web 2.0′s potential benefit for humanity tragically sold short by social media because it fell under a fog of marketing software.”

While Marshall does acknowledge the other side of the argument, I got the distinct feeling that he isn’t comfortable with the idea of CRM features being used in a social media setting.

Here’s the other side from my perspective.

Many people want companies to use social media tools to connect

Research released yesterday shows that 40 per cent of social media users are using these tools to connect with companies. What’s more, a quarter of users feel better about organizations engaged in social media.

Simple search tools don’t scale

As Marshall points out:

“The fact is, subscribing to a search feed for relevant terms in various search engines just isn’t going to scale for larger businesses.”

As volume increases, so does the complexity of responding to people online.

  • It’s no longer just one person – it’s a team
  • Higher volume means people on that team aren’t going to remember everyone immediately
  • An excel spreadsheet to report online conversations just doesn’t cut it

With scale, comes coordination

Once you reach a scale that requires a team-based approach to online engagement, you need to make sure that:

  1. Things don’t fall through the cracks
  2. You don’t double-up on people

That means you need a workflow management system, whether it’s integrated with your search tool or not. Of course, from my perspective it’s much more efficient to combine the two. You need a tool that:

  • Lets you assign tasks to people
  • Record the approach you’ve taken to engaging with people
  • Lets you store, rather than lose, the institutional knowledge of past interactions

Efficient reporting matters

While many practitioners aren’t paying much attention to measurement, I think it’s critical. If social media is to avoid being the first part of budgets to be cut, we need to demonstrate results. That means reporting on that measurement. Once you scale up, you need to find an efficient way to report on what’s happening in order to demonstrate results.

That reporting needs to go beyond traffic numbers. If that’s all you measure, you’re missing out. Tools like Radian6 let you look at things like:

  • Sentiment breakdowns
  • The type of content being written about your company
  • Share of voice
  • Themes in topic content

Efficiency, not profiling

Is this profiling? Only in an aggregated sense. Yes, there are notes associated with online mentions, but not in a sinister way – in a way that makes it possible for companies to engage in the way that people increasingly want them to.

What do you think?

Posted in: monitoring, social media

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

09.03.05

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.  

We have a post up (yesterday) which talks a bit more about source tags: http://www.radian6.com/blog/141/source-tagging-the-caller-id-of-the-social-web

As an example, I added the tag “Thornley Fallis” for you [Dave: Marcel added this tag to his search for posts mentioning Radian6].  So here is a chart I generated where I picked March 2, filtered for your tag only and then segmenting by media type.  I can quickly see that you had 1 post, 2 tweets and 11 comments on topic (we count both comments and trackbacks since they appear on your blog). 

Overall we had 125 Radian6 mentions on March 2 and you generated 11% of that.  I also know that about 32% of the mentions came from current customers and 52% from people who are not yet customers – interesting.  I can now easily analyze the conversations from customers vs non customers to see patterns.

Thanks to Marcel for taking the time to share his thoughts. 

Check back in tomorrow for the second half of the interview, in which Marcel speaks about trends in social media monitoring, tells us where he sees Radian6 in the marketplace, and gives us a sneak preview of an upcoming feature.

Posted in: monitoring, social media, tools

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Test-Driving The New Radian6 Features

09.03.02

Radian6 really got its groove on this weekend, with a whole raft of new changes that close the gap with its competition in some areas and set it ahead in others. I’d had a heads-up that some of them were on the way, but this weekend was the first time I’d had a chance to play around with them. 

 I use Radian6 pretty much daily and have fed a number of thoughts back to the team there, so I was excited to see the announcement of this latest round of changes. Here are the major changes from this release, along with my take on them.

Real-time notifications

One of my big peeves with Radian6 has always been that you could only get notifications of new search results once per day. In a constantly-evolving online environment, once per day simply doesn’t cut it.

With the new enhancements, this issue is removed; replaced by near real-time emails and/or IMs – available through the “configuration” tab. The IM function isn’t compatible with Live Messenger so isn’t much use to me unfortunately (we use MSN at work), but is a nice addition.

This new functionality is only available for new topic alerts, which may be a little irritating, but it’s more than worth taking the time to re-create your alerts so you can be notified more frequently about new posts.

For an example of how effective the new alerts are, about an hour after posting the images from this post to Flickr I received a message from Marcel Lebrun, CEO of Radian6, whose alerts had picked-up my images and who smelled a blog post in the works. Marcel also pointed out another neat feature of these “as-it-happens” alerts:

“When you click on a tweet via As-it-happens alerts, you get to see [a] special page with tweet, bio, recent tweets to/from and can engage.”

I’d missed this until that point – you can now log-in to your Twitter account from the conversation sidebar (see below) and engage with people from there.

“Conversation sidebar”

A little while back Radian6 added workflow features to their service – the ability to assign posts to others, allocate a status and classify posts, and add notes and tags. Very useful, but a little clunky.

With the introduction of the conversation sidebar, Radian6 has taken its first steps towards a workflow system that I can see us using.

The conversation sidebar appears on the left of your browser when you click a link in a notification email, an IM message or your “river of news” widget, while the post you’ve selected appears on the right. From this sidebar you can assign posts to other members of your team, identify your engagement with the post and any future action, assign sentiment and classify the conversation (leads, complaints, compliments, etc).

The “Add to the Conversation” field is a little misleading – the field simply adds a ‘note’ to the post in Radian6. With a title like that, I would expect it to post a comment to the post in question.

This is a significant addition to the Radian6 workflow which, despite its clear usefulness for groups, has been underused so far in my view. The next piece to this particular puzzle is real-time emails when you assign a post to someone, so they don’t have to continually log-in to Radian6 to find their newly-assigned posts. 

As the announcement to customers stated, “The Conversation Sidebar will help enterprise teams scale their engagement, coordinate their community outreach, and track and analyze their external conversations.”

Source Tags

You can now tag not only posts, but also sources. I can see this being useful for categorizing sources, flagging that you’ve previously responded to them, noting where they’re from etc.

The source tagging option is available from the workflow in the “river of news,” and from the conversation sidebar (you can see it in the image above). However, this option does not seem to be available for forums, which seems odd. Not sure why that is – while you might not want to tag things as specifically, it would still be useful.

Comments

This is a big deal for me: the addition of comments to Radian6′s coverage. This was a big gap between Radian6 and its competitors previously, and a big time suck for those of us monitoring online. Pulling blog comments into Radian6, while still allowing the option to exclude them from volume analyses, is very powerful.

Why does it matter so much? As I outlined in my PodCamp Toronto presentation recently, let’s say a car enthusiast writes about GM‘s latest car. If you were Scott Monty at Ford (note: this is hypothetical – I have no idea whether Ford uses Radian6 or not), that would likely not show up in your search results. If, however,  the comments took a swerve and the conversation focus switched to Ford’s latest offering, that still wouldn’t have shown up… until now, anyway. Now that comments are indexed, the comments referencing Ford would now show up in Scott’s dashboard, and he could decide whether or not to engage.

Interestingly enough, the comment indexing is provided by BackType, about which I’ve written in the past. Christopher Golda of BackType was actually in the crowd during the presentation I mentioned above.

One important point: if your profile is close to the boundary between different pricing levels, note that the addition of comments will drive up your montly search volumes and have a knock-on effect on pricing.

New metrics

The new rollout gives Radian6 users a couple of new metrics to use when looking at influence.

While users have always been able to see the number of “on-topic” inbound links (though how they decide what is “on topic” is beyond me) to posts in their search results. The new release adds the total number of inbound links (according to Google) to the analysis widgets. Very handy, and very easy to spot.

The other new metric is perhaps more useful as it’s the first thing, beyond forum views, to track traffic numbers in Radian6. The new release adds Compete.com website traffic statistics into the influencer widget.

However, there are a couple of “buts” here. The first is that this data isn’t free – it runs to $50 per month, per topic profile. The other “but” is that, as with many services, Compete is great but for sites with smaller traffic volumes (like mine), you get “rough estimates.” It also focuses on US visitors. Still, Compete is the leader in this kind of analysis, so this is another step in the right direction.

Content segmentation and analysis

You can now segment your analytics even more effectively, with break-downs available on:

  • Language
  • Region
  • Media type
  • Engagement level
  • Source tag
  • Post tag 

The biggest develop in this segmentation for me, though, is the ability to segment by sentiment.

While, in the past, you could allocate sentiment to posts, until now you couldn’t graph it so it was essentially useless. I’m a little disappointed to only see positive/neutral/negative as options and not the nuances (the “somewhat positive” and “somewhat negative” posts are grouped as “other”) but, again, it’s a good step in the right direction.

You can also sort your analysis widgets by numerous metrics:

  •     Number of posts
  •     Comment count
  •     View count
  •     Vote count
  •     Twitter followers
  •     On-topic inbound links
  •     Total inbound links
  •     Number of unique sources

As the announcement notes, “Want to know which keywords or topics generate the most commenting activity? Which blog post generated the most Twitter impressions? Now you can see the buzz around your topics at a glance.”

Conclusion

This is an excellent set of new features for Radian6. I have quibbles with a few things here and there, and the workflow in particular is a work in progress, but the product is ever-evolving and this is a strong release that adds significantly to Radian6′s usefulness.

The most important features, in order of importance (from my perspective):

  • The addition of comments;
  • Real-time alerts;
  • Graphing sentiment;
  • Workflow improvement via the conversation sidebar (would be higher with the addition of email alerts).

Posted in: measurement, monitoring, tools

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