Radian6 offers companies a new way to track and manage their brands online

by Tom Mason

It’s a big, cold virtual world out there – a scary place to send your brand out all by itself. After all, most companies spend years carefully nurturing their brands, promoting them, crafting them into exemplary symbols of their company. But lately the Internet has changed the brand equation. Sure, corporations have been creating and carefully managing their own brand websites since the beginning, but these days the blogosphere is brimming with brand name chatter – conversations that are taking place on social media sites that lie beyond the confines and the control of corporate websites.

It doesn’t take long to find your favorite brand being tossed around in cyberspace, on Facebook fan sites like “Bring Back the Coca Cola Christmas Truck Adverts,” blogs like “United Airlines customer relations nightmares,” YouTube videos showing cell phone-filmed clips of brand service meltdowns. These are tough days for the brand building business.

Enter Radian6, a new software that is the brainchild of a Fredericton-based company of the same name. Radian6 uses a powerful web crawler to track, monitor and analyze thousands of social media sites to gauge conversations about any subject the user happens interested in. Using a simple dashboard format and a series of widgets, a Radian6 user can plug in a set of key words – the name of a brand, a product, a competitor, a CEO – and then track all the social media chatter about the subject. But the real “killer app” contained within the software is the ability to organize the volumes of gleaned information into usable data: graphs, charts, orders of importance, developing trends.

If Radian6 performs the way its creators predict, it could be the leading edge of a whole new marketing paradigm, according to David Alston, the company’s vice president of marketing. Alston says that until now, modern marketing has been a form of carpet bombing – saturating the media marketplace with a message and hoping that it somehow reaches its target. Radian6 software provides corporations the opportunity to narrow the focus and get involved with individual brand conversations – a throwback to the days when marketing a product meant establishing a one on one relationship with every customer who walked into a shop.

Alston says the information gathered represents pure marketing gold. A user can monitor complaints and complements, track opinions of competitors, locate brand fans and boosters, identify client needs, head off marketing crises and gauge the success of marketing campaigns. Armed with this information a company can reach across the blogosphere and offer brand boosters a virtual handshake, say thank you to a blogger who is promoting a brand, or correct a rumor before it gets out of control. “There are opportunities out there,” says Alston. “A lot of brands are starting to realize this. They can’t afford not to be listening because these conversations are happening whether their companies are part of them or not.”

Radian6 started about three years ago by company founder and CTO Chris Newton and a small team of developers. CEO Marcel LeBrun and product development vice president Chris Ramsey joined the company soon after. Together they assembled a prototype software and took it to a number of early adopter clients who provided feedback. The product officially launched at last year’s Public Relation Society of America show in Philadelphia. Since then, company staff has increased to 37 employees, revenues have doubled each quarter and customers have grown from a handful to over 150 companies – leading PR firms, marketing agencies, social media boutiques and Fortune 500 companies.

“Marketing is supposed to be about establishing relationships,” says Alston. “Somewhere along the line advertising became disruptive and annoying. Radian6 is going to give corporations a way to get back to that old-fashioned way of marketing, the one that starts with a handshake and a conversation.”