Radian6 launches the ‘biggest game changer yet’ John Pollack reports…

By John Pollack – Telegraph Journal | Link to original article

FREDERICTON – A New Brunswick technology firm announced Wednesday its “biggest product launch” since the company started.

Radian6 Technologies Inc. has developed a tool to help businesses monitor and communicate easier with their customers across all social media.

“It’s our biggest game changer yet,” said the software startup’s chief executive Marcel LeBrun, in a promotional YouTube video that resembles Apple Inc.’s brag clips for its game changing gadgets.

Dubbed the Radian6 Engagement Console, the software integrates the firm’s social media monitoring service, which tracks brand mentions across the web, with a user’s network accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter and others, to manage it all in one screen.

Companies are beginning to use social media for more than just marketing and communications, LeBrun said in an interview Wednesday.

“It’s moving to many different roles and many different business processes,” he said.

Social media enthusiasts talk about “answering the social phone,” in reference to businesses listening to their customers and interacting with them online. LeBrun said he sees social media becoming as important to any business as the telephone.

“Here’s the device you use to communicate online,” he said of the software.

The console allows users to respond with their personal social network accounts, or the corporate ones, and can be customized to give different people different abilities.

“When you deploy this broadly it fundamentally transforms a company’s culture in how they think about customers,” LeBrun said.

Instead of being told what customers are saying about the company, employees get to hear – or more often read – it themselves, he said.

Radian6 will offer this to its existing customers – which include big brands such as Dell, Microsoft and Pepsi – as part of its dashboard, which features in depth analytics about a brand across the social web, for no extra charge.

The software is currently in beta test with some of the existing customers and will be on the open market in April.

“This console will be priced so it will make business sense to deploy it to thousands,” LeBrun said, though he wouldn’t reveal the price because it is not yet “set in stone.”

The veteran tech executive and entrepreneur wouldn’t estimate how much additional revenue the new software will generate and said the company hasn’t done those estimations, but he said “It’s going to be good.”

The software could generate additional revenue from existing customers using the social media monitoring dashboard that also want to give the console to hundreds of frontline employees interacting with customers.

“Now everything that happens in the engagement console is also recorded and available in the dashboard to be analyzed,” LeBrun said. “It actually enriches the dashboard.”

Companies can better and more easily monitor the affects of engaging with customers online with the software.

For companies such as Microsoft, which has a team dedicated to monitoring its Xbox brand online and responding to customers questions and comments, the engagement console will make their jobs easier.

“The consol is a real-time collaboration tool,” LeBrun said. “We can see what each other is doing. The second I touch a post you can see I’m on it, so there’s no duplication of effort.”