I spoke with Chris Newton, Chief Technology Officer, of Radian6 today; Chris reached out to me because he knew I was interested in how Radian6 tied in Site Analytics Data.   It turns out Radian6 built a platform that can import any data, not just site analytics, and from any vendor; however, WebTrends was the first vendor where Radian6  they tried to integrate Web Analytics.

Currently, Omniture and Coremetrics are being worked on to achieve the same level of integration.

Chris showed me a set of widgets on the top half of the screen that focus on conversation going on around Radian6′s own site; on the bottom half of the screen are widgets pulling in WebTrends data.

The current process involves telling Radian6 you want WebTrends integration enabled – then creating a referral report in WebTrends (this is the only type of report Radian6 will look at) – once you get the ID of that report – you pass it onto Radian6 and it pulls the data directly out of WebTrends database, which bypasses table limits, so I’m told (no worries, according to Chris Newton, if you have WebTrends profiles that are set to the default 200 urls or 1000 urls limits – Radian6 is supposed to work around this limitation.

Once the data is pulled in, it’s matched and correlated with the social media traffic and metrics that Radian6 collects – and Chris went over a few examples of how that might be very useful in understanding what conversations convert, or take action, on your site.

In the image above, the “WebTrends-Pages-Viewed” metric appears and you can sort the River of News by it, as well as do some other neat things that Chris shared with me.

In fact, one of the new projects Radian6 is working on is a Metrics widget to automatically extract the people and phrases found in a report – here’s what that might look like when it’s rolled out:

Comment count        inbound links      compete.com conversions

People                                  53                             30000                       12

Places                                 6000                         15000                        86

Things                                xxxx                          120000                     53

Keyword phrases       yyyyy                         12333                         22

When this Metrics Widget is operational – you’ll be able to sort results by any two factors above and get a sorted report – it should be interesting to see what that looks like.

Also, dynamic keyword selections that are used to populate widgets, for analysis, are on the horizon,  Chris mentioned.

I asked Chris about the Salesforce.com integration and if it’s in anyway related to WebTrends deal – at this time there’s no direct tie in.

Instead, what Salesforce.com integration allows for is the use of Radian6 as a listening platform, and is best used in Sales Teams, currently, but there may be other uses for this tool – in fact, I think there is.

As it stands now, with this Salesforce.com integration, it’s possible to view a River of News Widget and assign information said on the web  from someone in your Salesforce.com database  to that record – then, any other mentions will automatically be assigned to the same record – meaning you can collect information on individuals your tracking in a Salesforce.com database.

There’s certainly a lot more on the drawing board at Radian6 and I’m glad Chris Newton reached out to me .