I will shortly be testing Radian6 and Google Analytics integrations on WebMetricGuru.com (I’m happy to say my Radian6 Influencer Account was restored and I’m grateful to  Community Manager Cory Hartlen at Radian6 for getting me up and running).

As I understand it, Web Analytics integrations are in place for WebTrends On Demand (only), Adobe Omniture Site Catalyst and Google Analytics.    The instructions for Google Analytics are fairly straightforward and involved creating an  account linked to the Google Analytics Profile for a specific Radian6 email account.  Where an account has many profiles this procedure allows only one Google Analytics profile to be tied to a specific topic profile.

In my case, I simply created a Radian6 Topic Profile named “WebMetricsGuru” and gave that information to Cory over at Radian6.   In a few days, after communications are set up between Google Analytics and Radian6 (my account) I will start seeing data from my Google Analytics profile flowing into my Radian6 WebMetricsGuru Topic Profile – that should be very interesting – especially as my book is progressing and all the work I do with analytics informs my thinking.

In other words, I get my ideas and insights by the problems I tackle and solve along with the struggles that I don’t solve, but encounter and grapple with.   As my favorite painter Paul Cezanne once said (more or less, can’t find the exact quote) what little bit once learns for oneself, authentically, is worth more than a thousand of someone else’s formulas.  My knowledge comes from my curiosity and willingness to push the edges to find knowledge on my own terms.  Even when we fail, we succeed, at least our failures are “authentic”.

Getting back to the Radian6 Google Analytics Integration, my understanding based on what I heard today is that it can be free for accounts past a certain size (spend) but I don’t want to put any numbers out there as I am not sure I have all the information.

You can see the Google Analytics data in lower part of each black box on the right, above.   I took this from a screen shot Cory showed me today but in a few days I’ll be able to replicate it myself on my own account.

The analytics integration makes sense when your a brand or business and your monitoring not only what people are saying about you, but what of that “buzz” actually lands on your website.  If your “listening” is not site specific, any of the analytics integrations probably don’t make sense (for example, if your listening to allergy conversations about a few brands, but you don’t really own any of them, then there is no point to having analytics integrated).  But if you do have a landing page, something that you want to know about – this analytics integration makes sense.

I mentioned to Cory Hartlen it would be nice if, instead of, or in addition to the analytics integrations herein we also had Comscore Media Metrix data (or Nielsen) mixed in – sorta an extension of Compete.com that is already in R6, but blown out all the way to have demographics, time spent, visits  and so on, based on panel data, for the top 50,000 – 100,000 sites each month.

A very worthy idea to look at, I think.

I was going to write more – there is certainly a lot more to say both about Radian6, but also a few other products and services I found out about recently – but I’m too tired (it’s all that book writing).  I’ll catch up with those topics in my next posts.

I knew about the changes that are rolling out today on the Radian6 platform since last week, but aside to alluding to them last week in a post I remained silent till tonight when news many of us have been waiting for officially was announced by Lauren Vargas in a post at the Radian6 blog titled New Features in Radian6: Keyword Proximity Capability, Enhanced Query Support, and More.   To my knowledge I’m the first blogger outside of Radian6 allowed to see and write about the new features of Radian6 (if I had not been asked to hold back over the weekend, you’d have read this post last week).

Keyword Proximity Capability: Instead of getting results for keywords that may be widely separated in a post and thus unrelated, you can configure your Topic Profile to determine how close to each other the words must be in order to qualify as relevant search results. With the proximity search feature, you can go into the Topic Profile Manager, open the Keyword Query Builder, and adjust the proximity slider to refine the search.

This is a feature that has been asked for quite a lot and I asked for it over 2 years ago (Marcel LeBrun’s comment is at the bottom of my post).   Having this feature now part of Radian6′s platform addresses one of the main arguments often brought up against it,  monitoring full of noise.  Now we should be able to refine queries so there is much less noise.   To be honest Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon, BrandWatch and Scout Labs had this capacity for a while but it was notably absent from Radian6 – well, no longer is that the place.

In addition, Radian6 addressed one more weakness of their platform (lack of a text box to paste in queries) by allowing

Keywords can be pasted into the open field, as shown above (use instead of one-by-one keyword addition) and new filtering option enables robust social queries.

Enhanced Query Support: There’s no need to enter all the imaginable combinations of coupled search terms. Each possible combination is covered in the search process with an “OR” operator between the combinations of terms in the CONTAINS field and those in the AND CONTAINS field. The time-saving benefit here is that you are mass-applying the second field’s terms to each of the first field’s.

When I think back on how much extra work setting up Radian6 was because there was no “OR” in a topic profile configuration (only AND and NOT) seeing this new feature where our queries are much easier to define and much better at picking up the best set of information possible makes my day.

Percent Change Charting – know how much we’ve all wanted this feature – well, it’s here today (or when the features get rolled over to your account as not everyone has these new features yet).

I noticed there’s also a Widget “Refresh” button on the top bar of any widget.  The Widget Refresh button helps in many situations where a widget fails to refresh automatically after changes were made.  I’m glad Radian6 added this feature to it’s current offerings.

Another thing that was really smart for Radian6 to add was a “Search function” from within platform; as we know internal search within the widgets was not possible till today – but now everyone will be able to give it a try.   So often I griped as I asked myself why Radian6 didn’t allow me to search within a River of News for a string or word I liked and I’m glad this previous weakness of Radian6 has now been turned into a strength.

In the past all you could do when you wanted to search within Radian6 was click on a Conversation Cloud and hope for the best (there was no way to search within Radian6 for anything); at least now you can search within the results captured which should aid data analysis of the topic profile information.

The Engagement Console that Radian6 released last summer has also been upgraded to version 1.1 – I never really got a chance to play with the Engagement Console, maybe I should play with it.  Here’s a list of the new features added:

• EC Extensibility
• Keyword Group Support on Stacks
• Custom Date Range on Stacks
• Quick Search for Twitter Author
• Macro Sorting & Sharing
• Twitter Retweet Support
• Quick Search for User Assignment
• Keyboard Shortcuts (Select All)
• Multiple Topic Profile Support
• Configurable User Profiles

One of the “hidden” improvements of the Engagement Console is it’s ability to now handle custom scripting via the API, this is a similar feature to what Alterian added earlier this year to the SM2 platform.  In Alterian’s case, the addition of custom scripting allowed for automated categorization of content in a way that saved a lot of time processing data.

With the addition of the custom API Scripting Radian6 is gaining a capability that puts it in the “Enterprise” class of applications, something it claimed to be before, but wasn’t really.  Now, it can play with other Enterprise Applications in the same Sandbox:

• Examples: add a “Mail this post” badge that opens a new Outlook mail message with the post contents included.
• 3rd party CRM integrations: display CRM screens within the EC where applicable.

The Third Party CRM intergeneration is especially noteworthy as this is the year of Social CRM and for all that was said and done, Radian6 really didn’t have Social CRM built into it’s platform, legacy or Engagement Console, all it had was a WorkFlow Manager that was a poor stand in for really robust Enterprise CRM.  Of course, now the fun part begins and 3 party vendors write code for the Engagement Console to add CRM features to it.  Ha!

Administration:

To be totally honest, while Radian6 might have been developed to have group capabilities (such as sharing dashboards and widgets between accounts and moving ownership of topic profiles between accounts) I never saw this platform as being truly collaborative.  Radian6 addressed that weakness and may end up turning into a platform of strength by adding permissions that an administrator (super user) could administer:

Some of the other enhancements announced today are more subtle such as a way to update keyword groups in a topic profile much more easily.

But I saved the best for last (or next to last) – Macros.  I didn’t notice any Macro capability in the current legacy platform while for the Engagement Console I can’t tell you for sure if it had Macro tracking capability present or not.  If Macros take off it could automate much of the drudge work required to set up robust monitoring.  Just think of the possibilities here!

Now, I will say this, just because Radian6 added Macros doesn’t mean the user base is sophisticated enough to use that information, my bet is most will ignore that capability, at least, initially.  Eventually, more and more power users will adopt it.

And some type of profile support is being rolled out in this release as well:

While this feature is very nice to have, Twitter is just one part of the Social Media Universe and, to my knowledge, an integration of Radian6 and PeekYou would be nice (hint, hint).

PeekYou’s data is far richer than what Radian6 has in the Social Profile part of the Influencer Widget. Personally, I’d like to see PeekYou sell their data to any Social Media Monitoring platform and if Radian6 is the first, great for them.

And one thing that doesn’t escape my eye is the native integration Radian6 has (now) with other 3rd Party applications such as Twitter.   Earlier versions of Radian6 brought up Twitter in a frame next to a Radian6 login screen.  Enterprise Business wants seamless integration it’s employees often use – Radian6 has accomplished that (see below):

The same could be said for Facebook and for that matter, any application that wants to play in Radian6′s Sandbox.

Let’s talk about one or two more things – Web Analytics Integration.  Radian6 has had WebTrends Integration for well over a year and I believe that I may have been the reason they first tried to sell Radian6 to Data Analysts. It was me, in the summer of 2008 that asked the Radian6 team  if they thought Radian6 was just being sold  for  Communications and PR folks.   I asked a question  “What about Web Analysts” .. don’t you think we need Radian6 to improve it’s data collection as much as anyone?”

Well, Radian6 listened to me, just like Compete listened to me and developed their Traffic Dashboard – it’s one of their most popular features now and I suspect Radian6′s Analytics Integration will become more popular over time.

In fact, if what Radian6 just released is what it sounds like, then WebTrends integration has been added to with the addition of the popular Google Analytics web tracking.

Web Analytics Integrations: Google Analytics support provides increased capabilities for linking social media monitoring with web-properties.

It’s still not clear exactly what, beside the referrer log, is being ported over to Radian6.  My guess is Site Search Capabilities should be integrated but may not yet be.  Also Google Webmaster Tools should be integrated with Radian6, but is not currently.

The charts above attempt to show the difference between how many time a keyword is mentioned in Social Media vs. how often that keyword shows up in your site referral logs in Google Analytics.  For me there is a couple of issues with Google Analytics Integration (and WebTrends integration).

1. Keyword Referral logs (if that’s where Radian6 is getting the site keyword traffic from) is fundamentally different traffic than the Social Media Buzz Radian6 routinely captures.  While Google does includes Twitter data and indexes Forums and Message Boards, Google and other search engines have less than 1% of all the web content categorized - in fact Google Has Indexed Only 0.004% of All Data on the Internet. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what WebTrends and Google Analytics data should have been used for with Social Media Platforms.   I’d be happy to tell them.
2. From what I’m seeing, most of the really interesting data in Google Analytics is totally ignored by the Radian6 integration.
   • Geo-Location
   • Time Spent on Site
   • Custom Segmentations that a customer can set up in Google Analytics which Radian6 could be programmed to work with.
   • Video Tracking
   • Flash Tracking
   • ECommerce
   • Site Search
   • Navigation

In short, while Google Analytics Integration was the right way to go, it’s unfortunately circumvented from going as far as it could and i suspect in time the capabilities I’ve suggested we need, including this one, will be applied.

I think that’s about it for Radian6 improvements – I covered almost everything, but not everything.

I worked on the analytics of a clients’ site most of today; we did a lot of Google Analytics enablement to track visitors to this popular restaurant site in New York.  We have most of what we want to track handled by virtual pageviews and an event tracking script – but one thing I can’t directly control is how the site is used, or not used; that’s true of any site/project.

For example, all the analytics enablement work won’t tell us much about current or future marketing campaigns if the campaigns bypass the website.   The only way Google Analytics (or any analytics knows about anything) is when people visit a site enabled with tracking code, etc.  Google Analytics can pick up Social Media traffic (I have a social media traffic filter set up I’ve used on a variety of profiles) – but if, in designing and executing campaigns, we don’t design them to so they interact with the website (where the tracking code is) at key points – I don’t see how Google Analytics will tell anyone much about the campaign – or anything about it.

So … when people say … “show me the ROI” – I invested “X” in this program – show me the “Y” of it  …..  and nothing much of what they did had anything to do with the website (say, we did a WOM campaign and got 100 more people to visit one of the restaurant locations and spend “Z” amount of money – nothing of that has anything to do with the Analytics  enablement of the website – unless we make it about that … that’s right – unless we design programs to use the analytics tracking we set up … we might as well forget about setting it up in the first place – because it’s not going to tell us much.

So, I’d suggest – figure our your goals – then outline your strategies – and write down the campaigns and tactics that fall under the strategies  … do any of them go through the website you just enabled?  If not – collect 0.   On the other hand, having a well enabled site for site analytics – it doesn’t take all that much to set up landing pages and design campaigns and tactics that make people use those pages.

Or maybe we just make the process “fun” – read Beth Kantor’s post on How To Make Social Media Experiments Fun!  There’s also a post on What Do We Really Mean By Art? that I need to read.

And while we’re at it – in this case I noticed one very interesting feature that Google Analytics provided.

Mobile traffic increased by 52% over the last 100 days or so compared to the previous 100 days; interesting because even if you can’t get everything to run through a website – you can probably get it to run though a mobile site since just about everyone has a mobile device and most are created to run some level of browsing activity.

Getting to my journal – read It’s Not About Influence, It’s About Trust by Jason Falls which I thought was quite a good post.  In it Jason makes a point that …

… The difference in influence and trust is the difference in quantity and quality. Perez Hilton can get you a lot of eyeballs, but are they the right eyeballs and will they do anything with your information? Louis Gray won’t get you a lot of eyeballs, in comparison, but the ones he gets are golden. He gets them because his audience trusts him.

I’m more interested in Trust than Influence, which you can’t put in a can.

But you can put a sandwich in a can and make it last a year, so I’m told – it’s called a Candwich.

Trying to wrap my head around the idea – can’t say I’m wild about it – it’s one thing to put a sandwich in a can, but would you really want to eat it after a year if you had a choice?   I suppose, if I’m desperate…..

Did you realize Social Media might help people with Social Anxieties – see Can Social Media Help with Social Anxiety Disorder?

….We could even speculate that perhaps, one of the many reasons Social Media has become so popular is due to the massive amount of people plagued by this disorder. Besides its convenience and global reach, Social Media can also play an important role to help heal those who suffer from the silence of this all too common turmoil.

There’s also a nice info-graphic here.