Salesforce Radian6 is one of the most popular social media monitoring tools, used by large companies and organizations as well as smaller agencies that carry out the monitoring for their customers. With more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloudcomputing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise, leveraging social, mobile and open cloud technologies to put customers at the heart of their business.

Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multitenant architecture, the company's platform and application services allow customers to:

• Create employee social networks with Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Rypple and Salesforce Force.com.
• Develop customer social networks with the Salesforce SalesCloud, Salesforce Data.com, Salesforce ServiceCloud, and Salesforce Site.com.
• Connect with customers on public social networks with Salesforce Heroku and Salesforce Radian6.
• Empower small businesses to become social enterprises with Salesforce Desk.com and Salesforce Do.com.
• Extend a company's social enterprise with apps from the leading enterprise app marketplace, AppExchange.
• Run apps on Database.com, the first social enterprise database.

Salesforce Radian6 hailed as the most innovative vendor in the social listening landscape

Just recently, Salesforce Radian6 has been selected as a "leader" in Forrester Research's report "The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q2 2012″, that evaluated nine vendors based on 64 criteria, including current offering, strategy and market presence. In the report, Salesforce Radian6 was deemed most innovative vendor in the landscape due to its key strengths, including its dashboard functionality in its current offerings and competitive road map.

"It's an honor to be recognized by Forrester for our strong product functionality and vision for innovation," said Marcel LeBrun, SVP and GM for Salesforce Radian6. "We believe our success in the industry is the direct result of Radian6' proven ability to help social enterprises transform how they listen, analyze and engage with their customers on public social networks."

Comprehensive Dashboard

Radian6's dashboard is the most fully featured tool on the market and the company even continues to add features to the dashboard, including a dedicated Insights dashboard, which utilizes third-party data analysis tools."

In order to use Radian6, it is not necessary to integrate own social media accounts. However, the tool, in conjunction with the Engagement Console, is a convenient way for the customer service to respond directly in real time to specific inquiries or mentions of the users on the social web.

The creation of a campaign or a topic profile at Radian6 turns out to be very structured and clear. It is possible to filter according to 17 languages, 12 media types and a very large number of countries, which can be included in the search, too. The user can create further so-called "keywords groups" that can specify different types, such as brands, competitors and industry.

In the next step, it is possible to enter keywords for the sentiment analysis, and set how many specific sectors should be weighted. From the beginning, Radian6 allows the user to access historical data that, by default, goes back up to 30 days. As already mentioned, the user can configure the dashboard freely and has direct access to the data crawled from forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and others.

Continued Innovation

Widgets help to filter, compare and graphically view the data chosen for a specific period of time. For example, a pie chart comparison of the media types deriving the most mentions, or which language is most used in most social networks in relation to the brand. Clicking on this graphical presentation leads directly to a listing of current posts, the so-called "River of News".

Radian6 has also integrated a sentiment analysis, however, recognizes only the English language. The posts are automatically classified as positive, neutral and negative - this however can be corrected manually.

The data will be stored by Radian6 permanently and, on customer request, it is also possible to obtain data retroactively for several years. Another interesting feature is the ability to compare your brand with competitors: you have to create a keyword group of the type "brands" and one of the type "competitors", each with corresponding keywords which allows then to compare the brands via widgets.

The full version of Radian6 not only consists of the highly customizable analysis dashboard, but a "Dashboard Summary" and "Engagement Console", too.

The Dashboard Summary provides a comprehensive overview of the status of a brand on the social web, as well as information on the total volume, demographic data, sentiment analysis and influencers. The application is conveniently pre-configured with a customizable analysis dashboard.

The Radian6 Engagement Console on the other hand is the solution to scaling social media engagement across your organization. This desktop application helps your company listen, engage, and measure your outreach across teams and departments, allowing companies to appear systematic on the social web. Own social media accounts can be integrated easily in this Adobe AIR-based application. Besides, this desktop application allows several employees of a company to operate and monitor in real-time and communicate directly with customers.

Radian6 offers the export of data as well, either manually or with daily reports. The information can be exported in various formats, e.g. PNG, XML, PDF, HTML and CSV, depending on the type of report. In addition, it is possible to set e-mail alerts for specific events and it’s a nice feature that the graphically prepared widgets in the Analysis Dashboard can be downloaded as an image file.

Radian6 can be handled very intuitively and the design and the graphical presentation of the tool is convincing in its simple clarity. However, if too many widgets were created, the analysis dashboard loses a bit track of providing a clear overview

Radian6 offers support by e-mail or telephone and there are also countless video tutorials and a user guide available.

Overall, with its wide range of features and options Radian6 is an excellent tool to monitor, record and measure activity around your brand and competitors in the social web. Especially the flexible dashboard is impressive, as well as the meaningful summary dashboard and useful engagement console.

Just keep in mind that building successful relationships with your online community doesn’t happen overnight. Get to know the people you are talking to and who talk about you online to be better informed to start the engagement. The more you know about them, the better you can connect with them.

By Daniela La Marca