Trying out Radian6

06Feb08

After a couple of people on Twitter wrote about Radian6, a tool for tracking issues in social media, I thought I would call them up for a demo. After that, I decided to try it out for a free 7 day trial.

It took about an hour of training by salesman Tim Tozer for me to really get it but afterwards, I was pretty much ready to go. After entering key words in much the same way as you would in Google, the software allows you to keep count of blogs that contains those terms. You can search back up to 30 days although I’m told that you can go back 90 days in the next month or so. From this list of blogs, you can see a description of the first few words and how many comments have been left. You can also delve deeper into this search set to see which terms come up the most often. For example, if I did a search for the terms “Obama,” “Clinton,” “McCain,” and “Romney, I would get a list of blogs that pretty much all relate to the 2008 US presidential campaign. From that list of blogs, I could then look to see how often the terms “economy,” ” immigration,” and “healthcare” come up. By seeing which words are most popular can start to give me a sense about what bloggers are discussing the most. There is much more I could talk about here but this gives you an idea of what Radian6 does.

Overall, I was pretty impressed with the software. It’s pretty easy to use and I found myself looking up more and more stuff as I became more comfortable with it. I could see which blogs are the most influential in any search and see spikes when certain topics became more hotly discussed over time. It’s a tool that would be very helpful to scan which issues were percolating under the surface before they caught the attention of the greater public.  By catching issues as they develop in their initial stages, it would allow more time to handle issues proactively rather than playing catch-up once an issue caught on fire.  This is definitely a tool worth checking out and worthy of attention from PR professionals.

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Tags: blog monitoring, Radian6