Social Media Portal

SHIFT Communications Selects Radian6 for Social Media Monitoring Platform

Agency to use firm's automated, real-time dashboard to track and measure conversations about clients' brands as well as to determine most influential sites and individuals for outreach.

We've evaluated many vendors and although many vendors do a few things well, Radian6 seemed to do pretty much everything well. Just as importantly, in terms of the technical support and sales support throughout the process, they were superb. So we've got a tool that's robust, that we feel comfortable with and people that we enjoy working with.

Boston, MA (PRWEB) -- Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications, announced today that they have selected Radian6's social media monitoring solution for use within their practice in both Boston and San Francisco. Radian6 monitors all forms of social media on a real-time basis and provides a number of analysis widgets for clients to track and prioritize brand conversations, to discover trends and potential issues, to compare share of online buzz and to uncover the most influential sites for mapping and outreach.

SHIFT Communications has already begun to use the platform and will be rolling it out to its customer base.

Quotes:
"Any company or any agency that's going to legitimately think about public relations, social media or community relations (which is the way we increasingly think about it) needs to have the tools that automate, at some level, the process of being able to capture all those distinct voices that are out there, all to be able to measure how important they are; to be able to respond in real-time. That's critical to us today." - Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications
Click here for video quote.

"We've evaluated many vendors and although many vendors do a few things well, Radian6 seemed to do pretty much everything well. Just as importantly, in terms of the technical support and sales support throughout the process, they were superb. So we've got a tool that's robust, that we feel comfortable with and people that we enjoy working with." - Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications
Click here for video quote.

"We are really excited to be working with SHIFT Communications and Todd Defren. These guys really get it. They are thought leaders in how social media is changing public relations, how it's changing online marketing, and they are practicing this on behalf of their clients. Also, they walk the talk. Todd, himself, is a top-ranked blogger and looked to by the industry as an opinion/thought leader and to where conversational marketing going." -- Marcel LeBrun, CEO, Radian6
Click here for video quote.

"What makes Radian6 different, first of all, is that we cover a broad set of social media. If you want to listen for your brand online it's important that you cover not just blogs but also video sites, image sharing sites and even microblogging communities like Twitter. All of these things carry very important conversations and you need to monitor all of them. Another thing, particularly if there is a lot of volume of discussion, is how you sort through it all. One of the things we do is track all of the breadcrumbs that are left behind online. We call these conversational dynamics. They allow you to sort through the content in very intelligent ways. For example, if there were a thousand mentions of your product yesterday how would you start? Would you read through all thousand posts or would you need a way to sort through it all? We can help you find the post with the most active community of discussion instantly. And we do this all in real-time -- it's not yesterday's view or last month's view but it's as-it-happens information. You can see issues as they develop." -- Marcel LeBrun, CEO, Radian6
Click here for video quote.

Questions & Answers (Q&A)

(Radian6) Why is it important for brands to be listening to what's being said about them in social media?

(Defren) In the past, happy customers generally kept mum: maybe they told their closest associates about their positive experiences with a brand. Meanwhile, disgruntled customers had little recourse beyond letters of complaint to Customer Service, letter-writing campaigns, outreach to the Better Business Bureau, etc. It was manual and tedious and rarely got any attention or action. But nowadays, praise and complaints are quickly and freely created, shared and readily found, via blog posts, tweets, video testimonials on YouTube, etc. The customer experience itself has gone viral. Brands who ignore this paradigm shift simply have their heads in the sand.

(Radian6) What does the Radian6 solution give SHIFT Communications over manually using a collection of free tools?

(Defren) While it's largely possible to mimic Radian6 results via manual searches across dozens of free tools and services, to do so requires several hours' worth of manual labor - not just for the searches themselves but for the follow-on reporting requirements. Radian6 gave us back our workday. Now we can focus resources on more strategic assignments.

(Radian6) After reviewing other solutions on the market why did SHIFT Communications land on Radian6?

(Defren) Radian6 had all the bells & whistles we were looking for in terms of functionality and a simple user-interface. We were also excited by the upcoming service features. Lastly, the Radian6 staff have been great all around: the good service did not end after the contract was signed.

(Radian6) What role does social media monitoring and analysis play in your agency's social media practice?

(Defren) The entire PR industry is undergoing dramatic change. PR is not just about calling the same 50 names in a media database; increasingly our role includes aspects of community relations - we need to serve, transparently, as our clients' advocates, both behind-the-scenes and out-in-front. Meanwhile, however, the social mediasphere is vast, so we rely on Radian6 to help us uncover impactful blog posts, comments, forum chatter, etc., that we might otherwise have missed.

Related Links:

For more information on social media, social media monitoring, SHIFT Communications, Todd Defren or Marcel LeBrun please visit the following Delicio.us link.

About SHIFT Communications:
SHIFT Communications is an award-winning, privately-held national public relations firm representing some of the best-known enterprise and consumer technology brands, including Akamai, Novell, Quantum, RealNetworks and Shimano. SHIFT pioneered the world's first Social Media News Release and Social Media Newsroom changing PR forever. SHIFT Communications' 100+ employees are located in the Boston, Mass., and San Francisco, Calif. metros. For more information on SHIFT's high-tech public relations and consumer public relations, visit http://www.shiftcomm.com

About Radian6:
Radian6 provides the social media monitoring solution for PR and advertising professionals. The company's flexible dashboard enables monitoring of all forms of social media with results appearing in real-time as discovered. The solution monitors all forms of social media, including blog sites, top video-sharing sites, opinion review forums, photo-sharing sites and micro-blogging platforms. Various analysis tools give users the ability to uncover the top influencers and which conversations are having an impact online. For more information about Radian6 visit http://www.radian6.com

###

Post Comment:
Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/Q291cC1GYWx1LVRoaXItRmFsdS1GYWx1LVplcm8=

shift communications todd defren radian6 marcel lebrun social media social media monitoring smnr public relations conversational marketing boston