Yesterday we looked at BackType and how they monitor comments throughout the web. Today we’re going to look at another company called Radian6. Andrea Tarrant from Radian6, was able to answer a few questions that I sent over that will help give you some insight into what their company offers.
• Comments – scans blog for comment count
• Engagement – algorithm built in that captures number of unique commenters that have commented more than once and avg length of comment.
• Influence – captures all of these metrics
• Friends – n/a
• Followers – captures from twitter
• Downloads – You can export all of the information that is produced by the widgets (ex: posts from the River of News, graphs, etc.) except for
• individual posts (in the untitled media viewer).
• Favorites – there is no way as of now to “favorite” a post in the River of News, but you can mark the priority, the sentiment, add tags,
• etc. in the Workflow version of the River of News.
• Views - Captures view count from over 420 different video and image
• sharing sites (youtube, flickr)
• Votes - Captures vote counts from Dig, Delicious, and Readit
• Links - We will show you the on-topic inbound and outbound links in a site’s posts from the Influencer widget. We also give you links to other sites where an influencer would have a presence (Social Profile).
From all of the different features that Radian6 offers I find their ability to give you links to other sites where an user would have a presence or otherwise called a user’s “social profile” is a key component in monitoring and measuring your social media efforts. For instance, yesterday we talked about comments which are quintessential for monitoring and measuring your social media efforts however it’s hard to weigh a comment if you do not know anything about the user who left the comment.
As you can see below a user with a smaller “social profile might not have as much of an audience where their comments re valued.
A user with a limted social graph or "social profile"
Where in this picture user 2 has a much broader audience where or he/she can spread their thoughts to a much larger group of people.
A use with a much larger social graph or "social profile"
Initially you would weigh user 2′s comment heavier since it looks like they have a larger audience hence a larger influence. In some aspects this is true and you would definitively want to make sure you pay attention to people with a broad audience. Nevertheless, User 1′s audience may have more of an impact that user 2 simply because even though user 2 might have a large audience it does not mean that they have a major effect on that audience. User 1 might have a small social profile however the people that they are engaged with them have a deeper relationship then the relattionships of user 2 and hence user 1′s audience will take action due to their social actions and comments. The influence of a user is very important and Radion6 does a great job giving you a glimpse of that user’s influence however there are some additional tools that help you unveil this that I’ll discuss next.
