While the Radian6 Summary Platform was released at the Radian6 User Conference earlier this month the dashboards themselves weren’t yet available to most accounts – now they appear to be available (however, I am not able to utilize the Summary Dashboard yet on my Influence Account at Radian6, assuming this will eventually be enabled, as will some of the free insights such as Demographics and Radian6 Insights add-ins).
You access the platform by logging into with your normal Radian6 login and password (except, as I mentioned, with Influence accounts, where the option of doing so is not yet available).
So here’s a video of what the Radian6 Summary Platform provides – I noticed it myself, recently, as an extension off the Engagement Console that Radian6 provides (an Adobe Air application).
In some ways I’ll go so far to say as what Radian6 produced in the Summary Dashboard now replaces many types of monthly and quarterly reports. Clearly, as the bar moves upward, more data, more actionable data and insights should be provided by Analysts – while the basic reporting is handled by the dashboard. Of course, the results will only be as good as the keyword groupings provided in the profile setup.
There were a couple of features I wish the Summary Dashboard had such as
- Customizable Dates (right now I can select one day, one week, one month, three months and that’s it – can not control the start/end dates – that’s a wrinkle in the offering but I realize Radian6 is making vast improvements in it’s platform and it can only move so fast. I’m sure, at some point, it will make sense to give users options to customize the reporting period.
- Dashboards on Keyword Groups (I brought this up at the user conference) – most profiles I’ve seen and set up have keyword groups set up in order to compare categories – but what about giving a user the option of making a grouping from a set of keywords associated with a profile, instead of the whole profile, as it does now? I think this idea has a lot of merit and, with a slight addition of that feature, pretty much does most of the work of a competitive analysis for Social Media. In the current setup, you’d have to have a separate topic profile for each competitor.
The addition of Insights Partner data into the Dashboard at no extra cost was a nice touch. What’s more, if you add more insights to your profile, you may end up getting more information in your summary dashboards than by default. Also, if you just created a topic profile – do you get to see 3 months of data via the summary dashboard while you can only get one month by default, in your topic profile – these are questions I don’t have the answer to yet.
I have been playing with the Radian6 Insights platform for a few months now – and many users aren’t yet aware you can, in many cases, use it by simply logging into www.insights.radian6.com with your normal credentials – in fact, you can be logged into the current Radian6 platform and the Insights platform at the same time and what you do in one place is copied over to the other as soon as you log out. That’s a nice touch – at least, I find this is the case for me – I can’t vouch that everyone yet has their access to Radian6 set up that way, but I’m sure that will eventually be the case, even it it isn’t now universal. With that in mind I embedded the video for Radian6 Insights into the this post, above.
And then there’s the Mobile part – I haven’t played with that part yet but there’s a video on it, below.
I’ll keep an eye out on iTunes for when the Mobile App becomes available – this is a feature (mobile) that many have asked for and again, here it is.
And finally -the most powerful part of Radian6, the Engagement Console Extensions Gallery – is more geared to office automation and open programming – allows a user to piggyback different insights and data that Radian6 provides with JavaScript and creating new combinations and acting on them in an automated fashion. If you can imagine the possibilities – you’ve got imagination.. let’s put it that way. We still don’t know how well the new platform and configurations will perform – only time will tell that part – but the possibilities here are really exciting because there are many insights that lend themselves to automation and can you can end up with some really powerful mashups, potentially.
I think this last video you should watch a few times over – just to get the full breadth of what this offering can create – all it needs is solutions architects, like myself, and someone talented as a programmer to implement. Of course, you need the business requirements in order to create the darn thing in the first place .. but for that … more than anything else, imagination is called for.
An that … Imagination – is in short supply.
Yes, understand the business – but visualize data can do and how to do it .. that’s applied imagination in context.
By the way – Radian6 just released at free ebook on training your company for Social Media – take a look.
