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.

It was big news in the online world last week when a comment by one of the founders Biz Stone, to Marketing Magazine, in the UK, caused a lot of people to start speculating that Twitter would be charging users to have commercial account.  To be fair Biz moved quickly to confirm that Twitter will never charge users or companies for an account.  So just how are they planning to monetise all that traffic then?

Well, it’s probably worthwhile look ing at Google.  Back in 2001 they had a great search engine but no business model and look at them now.  Now I don’t for one minute think that Twitter is going to find a business model like Adwords or Adsense.  In fact they will probably be looking more to the Facebook model.  To some extend I think Facebook would have been the ideal partner for Twitter, and so did Facebook.  Mark Zuckerburg himself called Twitter “an elegant model”.  So why did talks break down between Twitter and Facebook. Well Facebook were offering $500m in Facebook stock, which is essentially paper money at the moment, and also over-values Facebook.  In addition the Twitter founders feel they have unfinished business with Twitter.

Below I’ve jotted down a few ideas for how Twitter could monetise the traffic and service they provide without charging users a subscription fee.

1) Sponsored Tweets in your feed – Similar to Facebook sponsored feed ads.  This would be relatively easy to do but without the level of demographic data FB have Twitter would need to target it based upon what users are Tweeting / Favouriting.  Would advertisers like this, time will tell. Likelihood = 8 (out of 10)

2) Google Adsense / Banners – Easy win, convert all that traffic into revenue.  Only problem is it will be low yield and also many people use an App to bypass Twitter.com.  Might make an appreance but would be worrying if this was their best attempt at a business model. Likelihood = 8 (out of 10)

3) Self service contextual ad system.  Google Adwords is the best, Facebook ads it getting some traction.  This might require a redesign of the layout but there could be room for some kind of engagement ad as Facebook like to call it whereby people can engage with the content and retweet the advertiser message to their friends. Likelihood = 6 (out of 10)

4) Research tool – There’s a whole load of information floating about on Twitter as to people’s thoughts, experiences and perceptions of a companies products and services.  What if Twitter could charge companies for advanced statistics and analytics on what people are saying about them, on Twitter, in realtime. Check out my post on the real time web.  This is along the lines of the TechCrunch article, mining the thought stream. Likelihood = 2 (out of 10)

5) Facebook Connect / Google Friend Connect - Linking either of these systems into Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect ID system’s will give both parties another level or targeting to tap into.  i.e. they would know what you are twittering and what you are searching for / what your demographics and interests are.  Advertisers would then pay a premium for this targeting.  Ultimately this relies on Google / Facebook selling the inventory. Likelihood = 2 (out of 10)

6) Classifieds – We all know what hashtags are right? Well we could have a slightly more user friendly system where people tweet their classified ads (would work great with geo-location), i.e. “looking for a housemate in Clapham, London, £600pcm, non-smoker”. You then pay a small fee for a listing in certain categories, or Twitter gets a small % share of the sale item if you were selling something ebay style. Likelihood = 4 (out of 10)

7) Get bought - Last option, is to sell up, take the money and run. Leave it to Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Likelihood = 6 (out of 10).

So there are some examples, but I guess we are all going to have to wait and see what Twitter come up with.  If you want some further reading Business Insider have run a competition with their users to create the best 11 commercial business model for Twitter.

So what is a location based service. It is a service (i.e. social networking) accessible through mobile devices that utilises the ability to geographically triangulate the device location anywhere in the globe, i.e. on your Facebook news feed, imagine seeing, “Joe Bloggs is in Leicester Square, London”. Social Networking is going to be the thing that drives this. Kids at school, people lost at festivals, mates in the vicinity, the possibilities are endless. But the possibilities also extend in so many commercial ways that brands with retail presences must be liking their lips at the very thought. Then there’s this idea of social graffiti, i.e. leaving geo-tags on restaurants, shops, etc, that your friends can see, share and comment on. Imagine I want to go to a local restaurant, call it up on Google Maps, and I see a menu from the restaurant, and comments left from 3 of my friends who have been there. We all know that recommendations are that much more influential if they are from your friends. Applications like Brightkite are already doing this in a simplistic way, check out the video below.

The barriers to this service are wide ranging and entwined with all sorts of legal / privacy concerns. We saw the backlash start with the launch of Google Latitude and then continued with the Facebook privacy row. Google Latitude is a location based service that can be installed on most new smartphones, although notably not the iPhone at present. Google obviously have a vested interest in this sort of technology with their complementary product portfolio of namely Maps, Android and Gmail. However for once it’s not going to be Google that drives this. Whilst there are a multitude of services out there like Loopt, Brightkite, etc, the growth is going to come from the established social networks. You can bet that Facebook and MySpace have Silicon Valley’s finest working on this functionality in readiness. To bring this to the mainstream you have to have an established network of friends in place already.

So until Facebook pull their fingers out and get on with it, we can dream. The Tonchidot, Sekai Camera is one such example. Premiered at TechCrunch50 this App stole the show and although the designers seem a little thin on how they are going to populate this augmented reality experience it is clearly a vision of the future.  Enjoy…!