I had a problem to solve around a campaign whose buzz I attempted to track – what is total number of Twitter Followers for individuals that are tweeting about a certain event (like a Diet Soft Drink launch that happened earlier this month, in Brooklyn)?

Well, none of the tools that I had access to publicly, could tackle that – I could get a list of people who tweet about an event – but how about the total number of twitter accounts those people have following?

Radian6, as it turned out, collects that data, and was able to provide me with insight that 115K followers (who could have seen a brand message).  Sure, there’s duplication of followers (some Twitter accounts of people who tweet about the same event might share a certain portion of the same followers – and some people tweet more than once about the same event in a specific time period).

Not withstanding – I thought Radian6 has done an excellent job of pulling together data from disparate systems outside itself, such as Twitter, Compete.com, SalesForce.com and WebTrends, along with Social Graph.

While Radian6 has a lot of room to grow, I appreciate being able to work with their product.

I think, doing Social Media Tracking for Public Relations events – requires more focus on aggregating data than any platform has yet done.   For example, if a bunch of YouTube videos about a product launch took place, say 20 or 30, I want the software platform to go in and count the views of all of the videos and come up with an aggregate number – say ….  500 views from YouTube videos across 20 videos posted (average of 25 views per video).

In a way, the data is already present by most of the platforms, it just needs a little more work to make it usable.   Just a thought on a sunny Wednesday in August.