The best analogy I have heard for social media, from the guys at Ryan MacMillan, is to imagine you are at a dinner party and you don’t know anyone. You look across the crowd and there are several, possibly hundreds of people out there and many different conversations going on. Some may even be about you. What right do you have to go up and join in any given conversation? The answer is, you don’t have any right at all. What say this time you bring something of value like a couple of glasses of champagne and introduce yourself. Well, the glasses will most probably be gratefully received and you may exchange a few words and then leave. Alternatively you may strike up a conversation and stay. Either way, you have brought value to the conversation and you have not outstayed your welcome. Too often I hear people tell us if a conversation is going on online about our brand we need to take part. I disagree, I think we should know about that conversation but only choose to enter if we have a role to play or we can add value.
With this in mind I have been trialling a social media monitoring tool called Radian 6 courtesy of the guys at 6 Consulting. Radian 6’s software monitors news, video, image, blog, micro-blog and forum activity on a real-time basis and spits all this information out into a dashboard. From this dashboard you can see exactly what conversations are going on about your brand, sentiment attached to the conversations, how influential they are, etc etc. It really is a very powerful tool.
The first thing you have to do is calibrate your settings, so as an example I set out to see if I could see what kind of buzz was generated when Facebook changed their terms and conditions recently. So I setup all the corresponding options around geo locations / languages / types of media to include, then I built a keyword query. The query meant that each article had to contain “Facebook” and “change” and “privacy” and terms and conditions”. It has to be this detailed to make sure it doesn’t bring up every article ever written about Facebook. Then I set it to look back at the last 3 days (bear in mind it is as good as real time, circa a 15min lag). Once I’ve entered this I can choose how influential to make certain elements such as time spent looking at the article vs how many comments it has had etc.
With all this setup it took me through to the dashboard. At this point I have to say this application is extremely fast and well built. The dashboard is essentially a drag-and-drop iGoogle style page where I can take all of the key things I want to monitor and dump them onto a page. This is what I pulled together in literally 5 minutes.
Important to note as well that every single element can be drilled down further to see the next level of data. Working clockwise from the top left I have..
1) Trending Keywords
2) Articles and level of engagement
3) Posts by hour / day / week / month
4) Top 10 most active posts by comments
5) Most Influential Posters
With the right calibration this is an incredibly powerful tool which can allow media agencies / brands to monitor everything that is being said about them online in real-time. I’m no social media “guru” but one of the first pillars of social media is to listen. Then the decision whether to get involved is all yours!
6 Consulting are an Authorised Solution Provider for Radian 6 in the UK. If required they can consult on and provided managed services around Radian 6.