“Who are the people talking about us, and what are they saying?”
That’s generally the first question that comes up when companies begin to listen to social media online — and incidentally, it’s been the first question since I started social media listening back at Dell in 2006. I’ve found, that while the question might change slightly based on specific products, brands or campaigns, organizations are still fundamentally trying to gather insights on who’s talking about their brand and what they’re saying.
Yesterday marked the announcement by Radian6 of a new set of tools for their social media listening platform – Radian6 Insights. Insights are now seamlessly integrated with the standard Radian6 package providing companies new ways to slice and dice data that users collect online to help answer the question who’s talking and what they’re saying. Also announced was the Radian6 Summary Dashboard- a simplified way to get a high-level view of the data coming out of the tool (especially the insights) and perfect for providing information to others within your company who may not use Radian6.
The heart of Radian6 Insights is its integration of analysis from partner sites for the content that your Radian6 topic profile has collected. The types of analysis differ based on the site which currently include Klout, OpenAmplify and OpenCalais as well as some twitter insights direct from Radian6.
Radian6 Insights provides:
- Post level analysis such as the topics, entities and themes being discussed in a stream of posts.
- New tools for tracking hashtags and trending topics on twitter
- Author level analysis such as gender, who the author influences and is influenced by
- A common interface for the insights data to be displayed and interacted with other data from Radian6
So what does this mean? Is Radian6 now an automated analysis machine that will do all of my work for me?
Unfortunately for those looking for slack time, the answer is no. The insights provided are similar to what you would find from the site itself, but provided through the Radian6 interface. While the providers do an amazing job of deconstructing language to derive insights, you’ll still need to get hands on to make the most of it.
But picture the following as a starting point for putting the new tools to use:
- Split out authors by gender, then pull up a River of News to see the posts to compare themes
- Split out the topics coming from OpenCalais out by media type to see how strong the blog component is compared to forums
- Dive into a series of posts that OpenAmplify has identified as detractors to find out what they dislike so a response can be made
The Radian6 Insights package is just getting its legs underneath it, but as they continue to add new insight providers and refine the tool to integrate that data the future is very bright for Radian6 and their users. If you have any existing questions, feel free to ask in the comments section.