Solution partner brings local support to the UK market while providing more focused, regional guidance with social media monitoring, engagement strategy and tactics.
Radian6 has officially unveiled 6Consulting as an Authorised Solution Partner to provide local sales, support and training services to the UK market. Read the full story
Two weeks ago I had the worst case of MANFLU! anyone has ever had. Or at least that is how it felt, it was much worse than the strain of flu either my wife or children had suffered from but thankfully I have survived and feel much better. Throughout this illness I started to wonder just how many other people were in my predicament. With that thought in mind I fired up Radian6, created a topic profile to search the social sphere for conversation threads around ManFlu!
Almost immediately I felt better, hundreds of other people were actively talking about their ailments.
You can see from the trend graph below that up until 24th September we moved along at about 10 mentions per day then it exploded peaking on October 2nd.
There is a great opportunity here for ‘Flu Remedy Purveyors’ to listen, learn, engage and help!
For those of you reading this that are not quite sure just how bad ManFlu is, please watch the short video below.
‘Radian6 - Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Platform’
I am often asked what Social Media Monitoring is. It is also given other names such as
- Social Media Metrics
- Social Media Measurement
- Social Media Analysis
and so on…
We like to call it ‘Social Media Monitoring AND Engagement’ as the monitoring element is not the end of the story. If you wish to monitor mentions of your brand, product or service this is relatively simple to do. A plethora of tools are available that can help you ascertain your ‘Mention Metrics’ but the real question is not just monitoring, it goes further, deeper and wider than that. Engagement in the conversation is key.
So where do you start with social media monitoring and engagement.
Many agencies will tell you to measure the amount of mentions for your brand and the sentiment towards it. That’s a great thing to understand but there is more, much more, such as:
- Your competitors - what are they doing and saying, what are people saying about them.
- Your customers - they have a voice, and often want to be heard:
- Compliments
- Complaints
- Concerns
- Suggestions
- Your potential customers - who is your product relevant to? what would they be discussing, what pain does your product/service/application solve.
- Your content - Yes you should be searching for copyright infringement
- Your industry - you are not the only one doing what you do!
Lots of tools exist and over a period of time we have reviewed most of them. This is the part where we become very biased! 6Consulting are a UK focused Radian6 Solutions Partner, with that in mind we are of course going to recommend Radian6 as the platform of choice. Things to remember when selecting a tool:
- Real time monitoring
Real time analysis of social media interactions is possibly the most important factor. Social Media never sleeps, it is 24 hours a day 365 days a year. If someone mentions my business, product. service or industry I want to know about it in real time, not tomorrow. If using social media monitoring in a customer service capacity what good is finding a complaint made 24 or 48 hours earlier? you need to know immediately, have a process for engagement and a tool to monitor it.
- Feed Farm
How much of the Social Sphere does you social media monitoring tool search? and if it does not pick up something which you know exists you must have the ability to add that source to the system on the spot, not through a support system or by making a telephone call.
- The ability to determine sentiment - not computer generated but with human intervention!
Sentiment analysis has considerable debate surrounding it. What is important to consider is ‘Context’. I can think of numerous sentences that a computer sentiment engine would determine as negative, but in my native tongue it means the opposite. Computer generated sentiment analysis is not full proof, you must have the ability to alter it based on human interpretation. As an example the word ‘BAD’ would be segmented as negative, how often have you heard it used in a positive way?
- Flexibility
Any good system will enable YOU to decide what to monitor, how to monitor it. If you have a lightbulb moment and want to search on something you need the flexibility to do it, not have to pick up the phone and call your consultant!
- Reporting
It must have a reporting facility, you need to be able to export in PDF, CSV, XML or other.
- Web Based - SAAS (Software As A Service)
Self explanatory, you don’t want a system installed, you want to be able to access it from anywhere and let someone else deal with hosting, reliability, infrastructure.
- Consultancy Independent
Many applications for social media monitoring need a consultancy to do the work, when selecting a platform ensure the system has the potential to be ‘Consultancy Independent’ i.e you have the flexibility to set up and change how the system works and don’t require an outside source to do this. Of course, some of you may not have the internal bandwidth/manpower/resource to monitor social media and you may decide to work with a consultancy and that’s fine, but have access to the system yourself as well.
That’s enough for you to digest in this post, part two in this series is going to take a look at the rules of engagement, your suggestions and comments are welcome.
The Final Five
After 3 months of tantrums, arguements, evictions, forced removal, drunkeness and general frivolity BB9 on Channel4 draws to an end today. At our regular management meeting today we took a high level decision to take a look at the online chatter and have a an office flutter based on our results.
So we fired up our Radian6 social media monitoring and engagement platform, built a quick profile to search out and find all mentions of BB9 within social media over the last 30 days.
I’ll show you what we found in a moment, but first it is worth noting what others (the bookies) have been saying. The Metro (free London paper) said that Mikey and Rex were the favorites to win, click here to see what bettingpro said.
It should be noted that odds are determined by crowd sourced data, what better crowd could there be than the thousands of people discussing BB9 within social media.
Now we could have spent quite a bit of time analyzing the data we have found but as this is just for fun we are working on just simple mentions over the last 30 days, here’s what we found:
Mentions over the last 30 days:
Mentions over the last 7 days:
Mentions over the last 1 day:
Mentions today (September 5th, 08):
6Consulting specialise in social media monitoring and are proud to be a UK focused Radian6 Authorised Agent, if you would like to see a demo of Radian6 please get in touch with us here.
It’s here at last, the return of Xfactor, 3 months of singing joy, the good, the bad and most definitely some ugliness going on. 6Consulting love XFactor so much we have taken the bold decision to monitor the show within the social sphere using Radian6. The info below (stats) were collected via the Radian6 Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Platform.
Week one was very interesting, so heres the run down.
Top 4 videos:
Ant & Seb
Ant & Seb have become the most viewed audition so far this season, a classic viral video which saw peak viewing times on Monday and Tuesday morning, both days seeing well over 100,000 views. The video was posted by 55 different people. The stats are as follows:
Views: 436,032 in 7 days
Comments:1,783
Unique Commentators:1,585
Rachel Hylton
Rachel Hylton had the full XFactor treatment complete with background sob story. An amazing voice and a close second in viewing figures, we expect to see more of her over the coming weeks. The stats are as follows:
Views: 330,688 in 7 days
Comments:1,834
Unique Commentators:1,456
Alexandra Davies
Alexandra Davies was third most viewed XFactor video this week peaking at 74,090 views. The young 16 year old gave a good audition. The stats are as follows:
Views: 74,090 in 7 days
Comments: 300
Unique Commentators:265
Dreamtime
Dreamtime is a personal favourite of mine, a classic XFactor audition with huge viral potential sadly not lived up to. The stats are as follows:
Views: 39,849 in 7 days
Comments: 130
Unique Commentators:126
6Consulting specialise in social media monitoring and are proud to be a UK focused Radian6 Authorised Agent, if you would like to see a demo of Radian6 please get in touch with us here.
Andy Larks talks about Dell’s marketing strategy and how social media is all important. It should be noted that the listening aspect he repeatedly refers to is via the Radian6 social media monitoring and engagement platform that we here at 6Consulting specialise in.
This is a re-post from the Radian6 Website
With the ease of use of Web 2.0 social media sites consumers are now publishers and broadcasters. They have the ability to share their opinions, needs, complaints, and ideas in a way that is not only immediate but permanently recorded and easily spread. Consumers are no longer whispering amongst themselves. They are shouting from the tops of mountains. They are shouting out to brands.
But are their favorite brands listening to them? And if they are listening are they then engaging in such a way that:
- maintains or grows that brand’s reputation,
- improves a customer’s experience,
- helps someone learn more about a product,
- solves a problem,
- positions properly against a competitor
- delivers valued content
- enables and/or thanks a fan
- encourages participation in that brands future success
But is the act of listening and engaging, in general, good enough? It’s certainly a great start. But the act of embracing the social web in this way begins to create a whole new set of challenges.
For a moment, imagine way back in history when businesses got their first phone. Customers could call them to place orders but they could also call to complain, get help, give feedback etc… So, naturally, departments within companies got phones as well to answer these different types of calls and used a new feature to transfer calls between them. This worked so well that these companies began to grow and with growth came the need to add more phones and more staff. And with more staff meant the need to assign calls to the right people within departments based on skill, availability, language, territory etc… It also meant an increased load at times and a challenge to ensure calls were answered quick enough to maintain or increase client satisfaction. And so it goes. It’s the sophisticated contact centers of today that show us where it can all end up.
Brands listening to and engaging with the social web, or what we like to call, answering the “social phone”, quickly face the same challenges. They are expected to:
- answer or engage quickly because commenting activity usually happens in the first 24-48 hours
- operate in multiple languages and filter content by region so issues and opportunities can be addressed locally
- cover all types of social media be it blogs, forums and opinion sites, picture and video sharing sites, online mainstream news and emerging media like Twitter and Friendfeed
- prioritize by what’s going viral or who’s the most influential in order to be the most effective and efficient
- analyze trends in order to help calculate ROI
So keeping all this in mind, we find it particularly exciting when we get to work with a company that believes in listening and engaging with their community, that shares our vision as to where this is all headed, and that wants to see this become a natural part of any company’s mix of valuable customer channels.
One such company we are excited to be working with is Dell. And it’s through their use of our social media monitoring and engagement platform today that’s helping to generate wonderful feedback as to where to go next (See Dell’s blog post: “Dell and Radian6 - It all starts with listening.” ) Assignment of tasks amongst a workgroup and the ability to track and audit engagements are just a few of these key features.
Conversations about thousands of brands are happening every minute of every day. People are expressing needs, sharing opinions, sharing ideas – hoping to be heard and in many cases, hoping to connect. Dell has decided to be part of the conversation, to assist and to share – and we are proud to be partners in helping make it happen.
What about your company? Can you hear the shouts? And remember – “everyone loves a good listener.”
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