WEB METRICS GURU — Thanks to Rob Key and the good folks at Converseon, I have a copy of The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 in my hands and can write about it (though I do not yet have permission to reproduce the Wave Diagram on page 6 of the report. I surfed over this Wave this afternoon and here’s what I think. First, this Forrester Wave establishes Converseon as one of the leaders in Social Listening Platforms – and last time, in January 2009, they weren’t even on the map – impressive!  Converseon‘s gain may have come at the expense of Biz360 and J.D. Powers, which dropped off the Wave this time (perhaps it was due to Biz360′s recent acquisition by Attensity – don’t know about J.D. Powers  – heard it’s a white labeled solution from another vendor – I’ve never used it so I can’t say for sure). The Forrester Wave for Listening Platforms, Q3 study is based on the premise technology and infrastructure to mine social media data and make meaning out of it has become essential to many businesses...

RADIAN6 BLOG — Community management isn’t what it used to be. Once upon a time, managing a community meant hanging out in an online location – be it a forum or a chat room – and moderating chat. Approving comments. Handling some support issues. Dealing with trolls, helping people with questions. That kind of thing. But community management, at least the way we approach it, isn’t just online issues management and discussion moderation anymore. It’s a far more fundamental business role, one that ties together responsibilities from a number of different places, both online and off...

FRESHNETWORKS BLOG — Over the last few months we’ve been conducting an in-depth review of the leading social media monitoring tools in conjunction with our sister company, FreshMinds Research. We’ve compared how Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360,Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos performed when monitoring conversations about global coffee brand Starbucks. We compared over 19,000 online conversations and have written about the following topics...

RADIAN6 BLOG — As a community team, we have a rather methodical approach to how we connect with and engage with our customers online. We refer to all of these conversations as "answering the social phone," and we approach our engagement with that in mind. There are several pieces to that, including how we organize our process and workflow, and the most important piece: our intent. At Radian6, we have set up what we call a "listening grid," or a system for capturing, routing, and responding to posts – answering the Social Phone – that helps us scale our engagement across the organization...

RADIAN6 BLOG — For the second post in our series on community modeling, we’re going to look at how the team at Radian6 is structured, in hopes that it gives you an idea or three about how you might integrate these roles and responsibilities in your organization...