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

1. 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.
2. 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.

Listening to Paul Greenberg, a McGraw Hill published author that wrote the book on CRM, a book that sold 200,000 copies and is in it’s 4th edition. His keynote is about the Social Customer.

Paul Greenberg publicly endources Radian6 Insights platform.

Edelman Trust – he reads it and cites it- says he does not like business but often advises businesses because most businesses do not know how to deal with customers when a SITUATION CHANGES. However, Paul says businesses are good at dealing with situations that have matured, are fairly predictable and can be mapped out in advance.

And many businesses haven’t figured out how to deal with the Social Customer. It’s all based on a business, it’s processes and how you deal with the customer. Paul cites an IBM study that came out a few weeks ago showing the disconnect between businesses needs and customer needs.

Social CRM definition – customers can impact your business in ways the business doesn’t know about or control.

CRM Industry – 16B in 2011 estimated -Mature
social tools – 770 million estimated in 2011 – emerging

Altimeter Group – came up with 18 use cases for Social CRM last year, now there are over 100.

Social CRM at P&G – Paul Greenberg says theirs is the only holistic SCRM. But Paul says that now it’s about more about engaging with the customers – emotional reactions to discounts and services, etc.

The Trends – what’s happening in 2011. Knowledge Management

– customer experience in limelight including new forms of measurements, KPI,s and benchmarks

– customer interaction engines evolve and become granular and verticalized

– enormous amounts of data to be crunched (1.2 Zettabytes)

– very strong increase in desire for customer insights – turns into Analytics Gone Wild

– adaptive intelligence
– collective intelligence

– increasing use of Social CRM and Measuring Success ( especially via Mobile Devices )

sCRM ROI – must be defined for each business individually ( not everything that can be counted counts and vice versa )

NetPromoter Scores – Paul says they are inadequate. dr. v. kumar (customer lifetime value, customer referral value, customer brand scores). all about the social graph of your customers.

Case Studies ( as we can now measure the advocacy effects – Social CRM is now Tactical)

– Comcast Forums – saved 8 dollars per call by routing answers via Twitter
– Pittsburg Story
-@comcasrcares 11 FT people field hundreds of queries a day successfully but failed to replicate throughout company because it came out of PR instead of internal cultural change.
– P&G – creates user communities, VocalPoint 600000 moms with 15 million people – was a social network was so successful it was spun out to it’s own business group at P&G. Working on having customers “co-innovate” and have KPI’s that can be measured.
-Orbatal – take every customer and gives them high value treatment that resulted in a 42% increase in business over 2 years.

Here’s more about Paul Greenberg:

In addition to being the author of the best-selling CRM at the Speed of Light, now in 4 editions and 9 languages, Paul Greenberg is President of The 56 Group, LLC, a customer strategy consulting firm, focused on cutting edge CRM and Social CRM strategic services. He is a founding partner of the CRM training company, BPT Partners, LLC, a training and consulting venture composed of a number of CRM luminaries that has quickly become the certification authority for the CRM industry.

His book, CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategy, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers, now in its fourth edition, is in 9 languages and been called “the bible of the CRM industry”. It has been used by more than 70 universities as a primary text. It was named “the number 1 CRM book” by SearchCRM.com in 2002 and is one of two books recommended by CustomerThink. The Asian edition of CIO Magazine named it one of the 12 most important books an Asian CEO will ever read. Paul has also authored two other books including “E-Government for Public Officials” (Thompson Publishing, 2003).

Paul is the Executive Vice President of the CRM Association. He currently is the Chairman of the Board of Advisors of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management CRM Centre of Excellence. He has been a Board of Advisors member of the Baylor University MBA Program for CRM majors, and the co-chairman of Rutgers University’s CRM Research Center.

He is a core member of the Board of Advisors for the Center for American Progress, the leading policy think tank in Washington D.C.

Paul has developed strategies and helped define CRM and social CRM products for all the major vendors in CRM and in social media. He has developed broad CRM strategies and programs for a significant number of larger enterprises and worked with them from inception of the idea of a CRM strategy through vendor selection when needed.

Paul is considered a thought leader in CRM, having been published in numerous industry and business publications over the years and having traveled the world speaking on cutting edge CRM and topics geared to the contemporary social customer. He has been called “the dean of CRM” and “the godfather of CRM” and even the “Walt Whitman of CRM” by analysts and organizations throughout the industry. In fact, at the end of 2007, he was the #1 non-vendor influencer, by InsideCRM in their annual “25 Most Influential CRM People” announcement. He was also named one of the most influential CRM leaders in 2008 by CRM Magazine and was elected to magazine’s CRM Hall of Fame in 2010 – the first non-vendor related thought leader in its history.

He is known particularly for his work on the use of social media, such as blogs, podcasts and wikis and social networks in CRM as tools for customer collaboration with a company. He is seen often as the “voice of the customer” and is well known within the CRM industry for this work. His blog, PGreenblog was named the winner of the first annual CRM “Blog of the Year” in 2005 by SearchCRM and the 2007 “Whatis” Award for CRM Blogs, by their parent company, TechTarget. He also received the #1 CRM Blog Award from InsideCRM at the end of 2007 and in 2008 and was named #1 CRM blogger by ForecastingClouds in January 2010. The blog is also the central focus of KnowledgeStorm’s CRM Blog community. He now also writes the CRM blog for high profile technology media property, ZDNET

Greenberg also thinks that a sense of humor is necessary when it comes to CRM and its social antecedent so he is the host of an edgy podcast called Experience on the Edge and co-hosts the totally insane, “CRM Playaz” with fellow thought leader Brent Leary.

He is a member of the Destination CRM Board of Experts and the SearchCRM Expert Advisory Panel as well as a member of the Board of Advisors for GreaterChinaCEM for many years among many others.

Currently, Paul lives in Manassas, Virginia with his wife and five (yes five!) cats. To reach Paul, please email him at paul-greenberg3@comcast.net. You can follow him at Twitter or join up with him on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Acquisition rumors have been going around since last Spring Radian6 was going to be acquired and now Radian6 has been acquired by Salesforce.com in a largely cash deal with $326 Million dollars – $276 million cash and $50 million stock,  as of today, March 30th, 2011.

The acquisition will enhance all Salesforce.com products including Salesforce.com products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 30, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Radian6, the industry-leading social media monitoring platform, for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock, net of cash acquired. The transaction is expected to be completed in salesforce.com’s fiscal second quarter ending July 31, 2011, subject to customary closing conditions.

Let’s talk about this.   Suitors for Radian6 have been suggested over the last year including Google, Cision, Adobe, New York Times (or any large publishing outlet);  while it makes perfect sense that Salesforce would acquire Radian6, I don’t think it was on anyone’s top of mind, since Radian6 does many partnership deals you could have just as easily supposed Adobe (for Omniture) or WebTrends could have wanted to integrate Radian6 than Salesforce.com.

… But the cards didn’t get dealt that way – and Salesforce already has an integration with Radian6 for over two years, as did WebTrends and more recently Adobe Omniture and Google Analytics …..  so there were many possibilities – but also t that data is a commodity and it’s what you do with the data that is important (you can buy much of the data Radian6 provides from Aggregators and or/ Alterian / BrandWatch / at el).

What this acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com really means is the next phase of Social Media Analytics has now taken place … that the Social Data is now going Quant … it’s going into massive databases where it can be cut and diced and segmented…. into data cubes, much as I postulated last fall in my Compete.com white paper on Spectrum Analytics – Tracking Social Media ROI using Spectrum Analytics.

I think the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com   signals  Paul Holmes was right on when he said after our debate in Davos last month that… (well .. read Holmes post)

My book about Social Media Analytics is all about that …. but instead of two or three years from now … I’d put the integration into next year; the needs of customers are becoming much more diagnostic and Return on Investment focused – and while the platforms have been improving – the skill to use those capabilities well, hasn’t.

Most companies still don’t understand what to do with Radian6 or the other  platforms / tools they use for listening as there are  vast repositories of data via Web services / APIs with many big pipes that are growing day by day.

Just because there’s available data (aka. Radian6/Salesforce.com) – doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve got the right Org Chart and Corporate Culture to leverage it; most companies don’t – that’s the real issue and why Holmes thinks companies ( Paul Holmes focuses on PR) require  Chief Analytics Officers – because you not can treat platform decisions to be made well, otherwise.

And as Marshall McLuhan said 47 years ago – The Medium is The Message.  The Wrong applications of the medium alter the message to the point it can not be communicated properly … and that’s what’s happening in so many places that I can’t count them all – people are still trying to grapple with Twitter and Facebook 101  - where they really need to go is QUANT … where Radian6 is going with Salesforce.com … but that takes another type of individual to worth with data … someone who is more a blend of computer science with the arts …  creative with the data, but honest with it as well.   These changes will also impact timelines and deliverables – where precision will be needed

Among other things the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce will

• Shake up the Social Listening industry … just last month Brandtology was acquired, and over the last 24 months Scout Labs, Biz360, Techrigy, et all.   There will be few independents left – clearly the time to sell is now ….  it will be difficult to compete with the research and marketing dollars that bigger companies can offer unless the platform has some niche needs it fulfills - and if it is that good, it will eventually be acquired anyway.
• Speed up the development of this field by bringing CRM to the forefront.
• Establish a higher price point for services around social listening.

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