Radian6 Teams Up With Klout for Social Analytics

Boston– Radian6, which offers social media monitoring tools, is teaming up with Klout and Thomson Reuters to help marketers better understand and track social conversations about their products and services.

Radian6 customers, attending the company’s first ever user conference, applauded the enhancements that are intended to improve how Radian6 captures the sentiment of what’s being said on social networks and adds demographic and other information to better understand who is saying what.

One Radian6 customer, who asked not to be quoted because of his company’s policy, said the partnership with Klout is significant because it involves collaboration and integration with another key social analytics company. Klout identifies and scores so-called influencers based on a formula that takes into account how many times that person or brand’s messages have been retweeted and other factors.

Radian6 Insights “provides you with a pretty robust overview of the [social media] landscape… what’s being said about you and your brand,” said Ellen Diebold, social media consultant at Humana, after getting a first look at the tool. “It brings in the best of breed into their tools,” she said, referring to Klout and the other companies now working with Radian6.

In addition to Klout, a Radian6 executive said its new tool has been designed to assess tools from third parties in a centralized platform. Those tools, which will be offered to customers at an additional fee, include:

-OpenAmplify, a tool designed to help better understand what’s being said in social networks, based on context.

-Thomson Reuters’s OpenCalais, a tool that analyzes and extracts “entities” or relevant content. Those entities include people, companies, product names, or events such as IPOs or labor actions.

Future plans call for bringing in analytics tools and features from Clarabridge, PeekYou, and Lexalytics.

Radian6 will provide access to clients who in turn would pay to subscribe to these Insight providers, according Sarah Carver, public relations manager, Radian6. Specifics on pricing were not available.

In other developments, Radian6 has developed a dashboard designed to make it easier to view trends over time, trending topics, and demographics. An iPhone version will also be available.

“Wow. Executives are going to love the new @radian6 summary dashboard. High-level overview of Brand Social KPIs,” tweeted Ken Burbary, VP, group director at Digitas.

“Love the ‘Region Heat Map’ (top regions, top languages based on volume),” tweeted Julia Cantor, digital strategist at Weber Shandwick. Adam Keats tweeted that he liked that fact that widgets from can be pulled out and embedded in email, web pages, and blogs.

“[Radian6] Insight “allows me to more easily identify what’s important in the data so that I can dive into it,” said Geoff Knox, listening consultant, at Ant’s Eye View. He and two colleagues tested the new offering.

Radian6 did not announce products resulting from its pending acquisition by Salesforce.com. That deal is scheduled to close in May.