Radian6 announced new features including QuickStart (which were actually present for a few weeks – I think) according to their newsletter.

New Features in Radian6: Quickstart, Widget Gallery and Influencer Enhancements
Radian6 has rolled out some key new features, available in the dashboard, to make it easier to dive into the data:

1. The QuickStart feature lets users create Topic Profiles quickly and easily, allowing them to get started with their monitoring faster and easier than ever before.
2. 44 Pre-configured Widgets allow you to pull insights crucial to your business without having to learn to configure each widget.
3. Influencer Widget Enhancements allow you to do deeper analysis of the entire influencer landscape around your business, and help you see both the high level snapshot of who might be important to you, and the drill down into details on metrics and specific results.

Radian6′s Social Media Monitoring Platform Now Tracks Google Buzz
Google Buzz allows users to to generate unique updates both from the web and mobile Buzz applications. Now our customers can continue to receive a complete view of the discussions about their brands since we have expanded our social media coverage to include Google Buzz.

We knew about Google Buzz tracking since last week – but I had not explored QuickStart yet – so here’s a QuickStart … of QuickStart.

1. Create a new profile

2. Enter your brand

3. Enter your competitor (optional)

4. Track your Industry (optional)

5. You get a Topic Profile Summary – very nice

Now you get to see a bunch of widgets (45 in total) that Radian6 configured for you – incase you want to use them – I think this is the kinda of stuff Chris Newton was speaking to me about last year when I had a talk with the Radian6 CTO on the phone.

Very nice !

Here’s an example of the Social Media Metrics Widget Collection which has 12 preconfigured/prebuilt widgets you can plug in – taking a closer look, many of these widgets aren’t hard to build, and many cases are the same widgets but with a different color scheme.

The Widget Collection is probably more for a beginner to help them see what they can do with the platform that much faster.

For me, the Influencer Widget improvement are more meaningul

The Influecers are broken down by media type – where they were not, before.

You can also drill down on each influener in more detail – most of that functionality was available before – but this is much easier to look at and work with.

Finally, you can also view the Influencer results as a tag cloud – this is entirely new – not yet sure how that helps me or not – but I think I’ll need to play with Radian6′s new features.

My gut feeling, based on what I’ve seen, is this upgrade is directed to improve the interface – I need to look at the actual results and ease of use – but that will be for another post.

Good Stuff!