I’ve been using Radian6 quite a lot thanks to meeting with Marcel LeBurn and working with the great people at Radian6 to funnel web analytics ideas of how to make it more of a tool that can be used for Data Analysis beyond what PR or Marketing departments might employ it for (ie: reputation monitoring is fine, but identifying influentials and then setting up the analytics to segment on that traffic can yield very deep insights - but no one thought of Radian6 as something to use that way - till I bought it up).

Another capability of Radian6, and packages like it, is to come up with keyword phrases that are connected to conversations around major topics - this is a capability totally absent from the current set of Keyword Research tools, that were never built for that purpose - never really built with Social Media in mind, and don’t have a concept of a “conversation” - while in Social Media, Conversations are the “brick and mortar” of communication - you can’t have Social Media without a Conversation - 2 way or peer to peer.

With that in mind, Radian6 is making improvements to their core product this weekend - here’s the notice that went out today to current users of Radian6:

Advanced Data Drill-Down Capabilities
Now from within your widgets when you want to drill-down into the data in addition to being able to open the data in a River of News widget, you can also launch it into a Times Series widget or a Topic Cloud widget.  For example, if you are clicking on a spike in activity in a Time Series graph, you now have the option of opening the content in a River of News widget or in a Topic Cloud widget so you can see the top words being mentioned during that spike.  To access this feature, when you click on a widget (i.e. A word in a topic cloud, a bar in a chart or a line on a time series graph) simply click and hold your left mouse button down and a new menu will open providing the advanced drill-down capabilities.

All of the widgets now have this capability and you can keep drilling down multiple times to get more and more specific in your research.  As an example, you could open a time series graph from a topic cloud, then drill into the time series graph and open another topic cloud then click on a word in that cloud and open the content in River of News.

New Social CIM (customer interaction management) Module
This optional add-on to the core R6 dashboard enables you to effectively management and track your team’s online engagement efforts.  Seamlessly integrated into your River of News widget and into your browser through an integrated toolbar, you can now easily assign/manage engagement tasks, categorize posts, set priorities on posts, track notes and your online responses, and run reports including detailed audit trails of your team’s engagement activities.

This new module also introduces the flexibility to have users accessing Radian6 directly through their browser, without needing to configure the entire dashboard.  The browser plug-in gives you quick and easy access to the information you need, with the Social CIM capabilities you need to get engaged in your brand’s conversation with a quick and easy workflow.

New Training Videos and New Feature Overview Videos
In the Help section of the dashboard you can now access training videos if you need a refresher on building Topic Profiles or configuring widgets.  You can now also access short demonstration videos of new features that have recently been added to the system.

Check out the video section to see quick demo’s of all of the new features in this release!

Enhanced Vote Count Dynamic – Digg.com support
In addition to tracking de.licio.us bookmarks, our Vote Count dynamics (listed in River of News widget and in Influencer model) now includes support for Digg.com.

Enhanced API Feed
The programmatic interface into the Radian6 content now include three new data elements for each post: language of post, country of post, and author of post.
In order to deploy these new changes, the Radian6 dashboard will be offline Friday August 29th from 9pm EDT to 10pm EDT.

Which reminds me - Radian6 will be attending BlogWorld.com and so will Buzzlogic.com - and that sorta suggests that BlogSpeedway.com, aka, me and Sebastian Wenzel, or just me, should attend as well.

I’m still making my mind up about this as if I do attend, it’ll be a last minute thing - but many of my friends will be there and we’re looking for a lot of new bloggers to join our Blog Network - BlogSpeedway.com