With the continuing rise of Web 2.0 and user-generated content, there is increasing interest by companies in monitor these conversations for a variety of reasons.  I recently spoke with Chris Ramsey of Radian6, a service that addresses this need.  Chris used the term “social phone” to describe how many conversations on the Web have evolved. In the past, when you had good, and especially bad, service from a company, you telephoned the firm and/or your friends. Now many companies do not even answer their phone. Even if they do, people can now use the “social phone” and describe their experiences on a blog, a forum, an online rating site and the other internet channels tat have become available. This social phone has a big volume switch that can be easily activated and ramped up.

So how do companies answer the social phone? First, they have to know it is ringing. Then they have to manage their response.  Chris said that a year ago the PR agencies were looking at the social phone for brand monitoring. Now many companies have taken on this task themselves and the focus is more on customer service.  They want to listen and participate in the relevant conversations for their business.  For example, Dell has a specialized team to make use of Radian6 to monitor, participate and manage the internet conversations about their business. Here is more on how Dell and Radian6 work together from the Direct2Dell blog - Dell and Radian6: It All Starts with Listening.

Chris showed me how Radian6 works. There is a lot of control over how you monitor the web. You can select what channels to monitor (e.g., blog, videos, forums).  You can select languages, countries, a list of specific blogs or web sites, and other criteria.  Radian6 provides 6 metrics. The attributes are: on topic posts, total comment count, total unique commenters, average engagement, on topic inbound links, and vote count. The vote count is an aggregation of digg and del.icio.us data.  You can adjust the weight as shown below. I like this feature.

Radian6 attempts to let users know how they gotten their ratings. Chris said that feedback during their early adopter program indicated that users wanted as much transparency as possible into how the results were obtained.  There are a variety of widgets to place our your dashboard. One of the features is the River of News which provides continuous updates on the topics you select.

Once you have set up your personalized monitoring, Radian6 automatically collects and tracks content for the topic.  It looks at all forms of social media including blogs, top video sharing and social networking sites, forums, opinion and review sites, image sharing sites, microblogging sites, online mainstream media and other sites as they become available. It tracks a variety of metrics and allows you to see the key influencers as well as the conversations. You can then export data and analysis for use in a variety of report and presentation formats.  

There is a new ability to show a social profile for posted items found in a topic profile. This allows a user to uncover who is behind each post. It provides a list of known and possible accounts across a number of social media applications in a hyperlink format so users can decide to reach out and add to their contacts (See the more new features post on their blog).

You can track the relative web buzz, or “share of voice,” on a topic or company. Chris showed me a comparison of GM ad Toyota. You could see the spikes in attention and determine what caused these spikes. You look at related topics and see the most prominent conversations. Here is a topic cloud on selected themes.

Radian6 is a SaaS tool that is offered on a subscription basis. One of the features I especially liked was the way it supports responses. You can assign who should respond to what appeared on the web, how they should respond, and manage the responses to promote consistency and avoid redundancy or gaps in coverage.  It describes itself as a tool built for and by PR and advertising professionals. I can see this in their response management tools. As Chris and I discussed, I can see applications beyond this initial focus for customer service, product research, competitive intelligence, and other tasks.