Radian6 improvements – Here’s What we waited for – Finally Here!

I knew about the changes that are rolling out today on the Radian6 platform since last week, but aside to alluding to them last week in a post I remained silent till tonight when news many of us have been waiting for officially was announced by Lauren Vargas in a post at the Radian6 blog titled New Features in Radian6: Keyword Proximity Capability, Enhanced Query Support, and More.   To my knowledge I’m the first blogger outside of Radian6 allowed to see and write about the new features of Radian6 (if I had not been asked to hold back over the weekend, you’d have read this post last week).

Keyword Proximity Capability: Instead of getting results for keywords that may be widely separated in a post and thus unrelated, you can configure your Topic Profile to determine how close to each other the words must be in order to qualify as relevant search results. With the proximity search feature, you can go into the Topic Profile Manager, open the Keyword Query Builder, and adjust the proximity slider to refine the search.

This is a feature that has been asked for quite a lot and I asked for it over 2 years ago (Marcel LeBrun’s comment is at the bottom of my post).   Having this feature now part of Radian6's platform addresses one of the main arguments often brought up against it,  monitoring full of noise.  Now we should be able to refine queries so there is much less noise.   To be honest Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon, BrandWatch and Scout Labs had this capacity for a while but it was notably absent from Radian6 – well, no longer is that the place.

In addition, Radian6 addressed one more weakness of their platform (lack of a text box to paste in queries) by allowing

Keywords can be pasted into the open field, as shown above (use instead of one-by-one keyword addition) and new filtering option enables robust social queries.

Enhanced Query Support: There’s no need to enter all the imaginable combinations of coupled search terms. Each possible combination is covered in the search process with an “OR” operator between the combinations of terms in the CONTAINS field and those in the AND CONTAINS field. The time-saving benefit here is that you are mass-applying the second field’s terms to each of the first field’s.

When I think back on how much extra work setting up Radian6 was because there was no “OR” in a topic profile configuration (only AND and NOT) seeing this new feature where our queries are much easier to define and much better at picking up the best set of information possible makes my day.

Percent Change Charting – know how much we’ve all wanted this feature – well, it’s here today (or when the features get rolled over to your account as not everyone has these new features yet).

I noticed there’s also a Widget “Refresh” button on the top bar of any widget.  The Widget Refresh button helps in many situations where a widget fails to refresh automatically after changes were made.  I’m glad Radian6 added this feature to it’s current offerings.

Another thing that was really smart for Radian6 to add was a “Search function” from within platform; as we know internal search within the widgets was not possible till today – but now everyone will be able to give it a try.   So often I griped as I asked myself why Radian6 didn’t allow me to search within a River of News for a string or word I liked and I’m glad this previous weakness of Radian6 has now been turned into a strength.

In the past all you could do when you wanted to search within Radian6 was click on a Conversation Cloud and hope for the best (there was no way to search within Radian6 for anything); at least now you can search within the results captured which should aid data analysis of the topic profile information.

The Engagement Console that Radian6 released last summer has also been upgraded to version 1.1 – I never really got a chance to play with the Engagement Console, maybe I should play with it.  Here’s a list of the new features added:

EC ExtensibilityKeyword Group Support on StacksCustom Date Range on StacksQuick Search for Twitter AuthorMacro Sorting & SharingTwitter Retweet SupportQuick Search for User AssignmentKeyboard Shortcuts (Select All)Multiple Topic Profile SupportConfigurable User Profiles

One of the “hidden” improvements of the Engagement Console is it’s ability to now handle custom scripting via the API, this is a similar feature to what Alterian added earlier this year to the SM2 platform.  In Alterian’s case, the addition of custom scripting allowed for automated categorization of content in a way that saved a lot of time processing data.

With the addition of the custom API Scripting Radian6 is gaining a capability that puts it in the “Enterprise” class of applications, something it claimed to be before, but wasn’t really.  Now, it can play with other Enterprise Applications in the same Sandbox:

Examples: add a “Mail this post” badge that opens a new Outlook mail message with the post contents included.3rd party CRM integrations: display CRM screens within the EC where applicable.

The Third Party CRM intergeneration is especially noteworthy as this is the year of Social CRM and for all that was said and done, Radian6 really didn’t have Social CRM built into it’s platform, legacy or Engagement Console, all it had was a WorkFlow Manager that was a poor stand in for really robust Enterprise CRM.  Of course, now the fun part begins and 3 party vendors write code for the Engagement Console to add CRM features to it.  Ha!

Administration:

To be totally honest, while Radian6 might have been developed to have group capabilities (such as sharing dashboards and widgets between accounts and moving ownership of topic profiles between accounts) I never saw this platform as being truly collaborative.  Radian6 addressed that weakness and may end up turning into a platform of strength by adding permissions that an administrator (super user) could administer:

Some of the other enhancements announced today are more subtle such as a way to update keyword groups in a topic profile much more easily.

But I saved the best for last (or next to last) – Macros.  I didn’t notice any Macro capability in the current legacy platform while for the Engagement Console I can’t tell you for sure if it had Macro tracking capability present or not.  If Macros take off it could automate much of the drudge work required to set up robust monitoring.  Just think of the possibilities here!

Now, I will say this, just because Radian6 added Macros doesn’t mean the user base is sophisticated enough to use that information, my bet is most will ignore that capability, at least, initially.  Eventually, more and more power users will adopt it.

And some type of profile support is being rolled out in this release as well:

While this feature is very nice to have, Twitter is just one part of the Social Media Universe and, to my knowledge, an integration of Radian6 and PeekYou would be nice (hint, hint).

PeekYou’s data is far richer than what Radian6 has in the Social Profile part of the Influencer Widget. Personally, I’d like to see PeekYou sell their data to any Social Media Monitoring platform and if Radian6 is the first, great for them.

And one thing that doesn’t escape my eye is the native integration Radian6 has (now) with other 3rd Party applications such as Twitter.   Earlier versions of Radian6 brought up Twitter in a frame next to a Radian6 login screen.  Enterprise Business wants seamless integration it’s employees often use – Radian6 has accomplished that (see below):

The same could be said for Facebook and for that matter, any application that wants to play in Radian6's Sandbox.

Let’s talk about one or two more things – Web Analytics Integration.  Radian6 has had WebTrends Integration for well over a year and I believe that I may have been the reason they first tried to sell Radian6 to Data Analysts. It was me, in the summer of 2008 that asked the Radian6 team  if they thought Radian6 was just being sold  for  Communications and PR folks.   I asked a question  “What about Web Analysts” .. don’t you think we need Radian6 to improve it’s data collection as much as anyone?”

Well, Radian6 listened to me, just like Compete listened to me and developed their Traffic Dashboard – it’s one of their most popular features now and I suspect Radian6's Analytics Integration will become more popular over time.

In fact, if what Radian6 just released is what it sounds like, then WebTrends integration has been added to with the addition of the popular Google Analytics web tracking.

Web Analytics Integrations: Google Analytics support provides increased capabilities for linking social media monitoring with web-properties.

It’s still not clear exactly what, beside the referrer log, is being ported over to Radian6.  My guess is Site Search Capabilities should be integrated but may not yet be.  Also Google Webmaster Tools should be integrated with Radian6, but is not currently.

The charts above attempt to show the difference between how many time a keyword is mentioned in Social Media vs. how often that keyword shows up in your site referral logs in Google Analytics.  For me there is a couple of issues with Google Analytics Integration (and WebTrends integration).

Keyword Referral logs (if that’s where Radian6 is getting the site keyword traffic from) is fundamentally different traffic than the Social Media Buzz Radian6 routinely captures.  While Google does includes Twitter data and indexes Forums and Message Boards, Google and other search engines have less than 1% of all the web content categorized - in fact Google Has Indexed Only 0.004% of All Data on the Internet. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what WebTrends and Google Analytics data should have been used for with Social Media Platforms.   I’d be happy to tell them.From what I’m seeing, most of the really interesting data in Google Analytics is totally ignored by the Radian6 integration. Geo-LocationTime Spent on SiteCustom Segmentations that a customer can set up in Google Analytics which Radian6 could be programmed to work with.Video TrackingFlash TrackingECommerceSite SearchNavigation

In short, while Google Analytics Integration was the right way to go, it’s unfortunately circumvented from going as far as it could and i suspect in time the capabilities I’ve suggested we need, including this one, will be applied.

I think that’s about it for Radian6 improvements – I covered almost everything, but not everything.

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