Here’s my first impressions of Social Radar – a Social Media Monitoring platform that I’ve heard good things about but had yet tried.   I noticed that many of the monitoring platforms (Radian6, Biz360, BrandWatch and now, Social Radar) have tried to improve the interface where a customer interacts – most often, the platform hasn’t really changed much but interface (user experience) is improved.   That was certainly the case with Radian6′s recent Widget Update and that’s also the case with Social Radar’s update this weekend.

When you first open up Social Radar – there is a variety of things you can do.

I picked “Health Care Reform” as it’s a pretty “safe” query for me to use plus everyone knows what is going on with it, for the most part.

I first noticed the Query Builder – which reminds me of Sysomos and BrandWatch – both have nice interfaces and tools to build and store queries.

It was easy enough to build a trend chart around Health Care Reform – and that chart can be absolute (number of unique posts) or Normalized (this is a seldom seen feature of monitoring tools – in fact this is the first time I’ve seen that functionality in any SM tool – not sure why it’s needed though, maybe someone from Social Radar can explain why they offer it and how it can best be used).

Running Analysis – I notices some very nice features that expand on the basic functionality of Word Clouds but it’s the visualization tool that is the most engaging aspect of Social Radar.

I have a healthy distrust of flashy diagrams and visualizations but it seemed like Social Radar did a pretty good job tracking Health Influencers – to be honest – I recognized a few names in the diagram as well.

There’s a custom report builder that lets you pretty much create your own report the way you want it – I haven’t seen any equivalent in another Social Media monitoring platform and the closest analogy for it would be Google Analytics Custom Reports.

You can search for RSS feeds and get the details of any feed you find – but – this functionality is hardly unique – Radian6 does the same thing, more or less – the thing that makes Social Radar interesting. to me, is the interface.

There are some other nice features that I’ll write about in a few days – I liked what I saw so far, yet nothing that I saw was that different from what other platforms provide- but the interface might be nicer.