The most important thing I learned in class yesterday was how Facebook is heading towards being a more open environment to keep up with Twitter. I also did not realize that Twitter’s whole purpose is to create such an open environment. Although I have a Twitter account I never bothered to look at the privacy settings since I only follow my coach and I never tweet so it did not really matter to me if anyone was following me. This is applicable to my future career because these open environments not only mean that everything I am doing online is available for future employers and clients to see, but also it shows how valuable these mediums can be for helping to network and gather new information. The openness of Twitter and perhaps Facebook one day will allow me to connect with more people than ever before and as Gina Chen showed us I can search for people I want to connect with based on a particular topic of interest. This could be very practical in a future career just like how Gina Chen explained that she even found story ideas by communicating with various individuals on Twitter.

In the reading in Groundswell I also found the POST method applicable to what we talked about with Radian6 last week. Under the People section Li and Bernoff state “what’s important is to assess how your customers will engage, based on what they’re already doing” (Li and Bernoff, 67). This is very applicable to a company if they are using Radian6 or a free program that is similar by using these programs a company can see not only what their publics are talking about but also where they talk about it. If ones company is having a lot of negative chatter happening on Twitter then having a Twitter account for your company and starting to address the issues brought up that way is practical since that is the medium your public is already engaging in.

            This is applicable to my future career because it will be important to listen to what my publics are talking about, but to also pay attention to how they are talking meaning what mediums they prefer to use.

            This all leads me to ask do I need to start building my social network now on Twitter? Or could creating an identity on Twitter now be detrimental when I am still deciding what direction I want to go in as far as my career that I would not want to have a set identity and then completely change my interests? The unanswered question I have regarding programs like Radian6 and how applicable they can be in terms of seeing where your publics are already talking, but what if they are not already talking do we then turn to traditional research such as surveys and focus groups to figure what social medium to use to best reach our audience?

Learning about how Radian6 works was definitely interesting.  I didn't know too much about it before class, but it was great to see how a single service could offer so many insights into an organization's brand online.  It seems like an incredibly powerful analytics tool that can really help an organization do some insightful monitoring.  At the same time, a great takeaway from the guest speaker was that no social media tool is a "magic bullet" - human insight is still needed to make your tools mean anything.

I'd like to see what other social media monitoring tools are out there.  As there are more and more social media platforms for information sharing and public discourse, is it really possible to see what everyone is saying about your brand, or can you just hope for a representive sample?  Is it possible to tell what the real ROI is from using social monitoring tools?  This seems like a really interesting area of study that I'd like to learn more about.

The most important thing I learned from our reading in Groundswell was how important listening is and more importantly how one uses what is gained by listening. The example about BMW’s Mini Cooper American branch was really helpful for understanding this. Trudy learned by listening to the natural conversation that was already going on about Mini’s cars that “Mini owners would rather see themselves as members of an exclusive club of people who belong together” (Li and Bernoff, 91). This helped her develop Mini’s new strategy of marketing to Mini owners not prospective Mini buyers. This is valuable for my future career because it is very easy to think you know what is best for one’s company. Trudy could have kept on marketing to future buyers like most car companies do, but instead she took the time to actually listen to what was being said about her brand and then put what she learned into action. If I can learn to listen and then put what I have learned into a successful campaign then that will have a positive effect on my future career and life.

The Radian6 demonstration in class definitely showed us how a company can really listen to the natural conversations that are already going on about their brand. I know Lauren answered my question that there is no typical size of company that uses Radian6, but  logistically is there a size it would work best for? It seems to require a substantial financial investment, even with the not for profit discount, plus the expenditure of the man power required to then effectively use the program would also cost a company a substantial amount of money. This leads me to ask what will a company do with all of this information if they do not know how to turn it into a marketable campaign for their company? This is especially relevant for a company to ask before they put in such a financial investment because they need to have some sort of plan of how this expenditure will increase their revenue.

In class we spent a lot of time talking about radian 6. I think that this is a great tool. It is a good way to measure how your company is engaging customers on the web. It seems like the setup is on the difficult side but the employees of radian 6 will help you get started and once you get going it is simple to maintain. Radian 6 has created a large variety of widgets available to their clients, but also has the ability to create a custom widget to meet the companies’ needs.

My Question is: Can radian 6 reach their audience productively with the prices that they are currently charging or are they going to lose business to those which may not be as technologically advanced but do the same basic analytics jobs for a smaller price?

Today I learned about Radian 6, what seems like a great tool to make a few steps forward in measurement, an area of social media that is substantially lacking in companies. I feel that way more companies are taking social media seriously now than they were 6 months or a year ago, but the majority of companies are just running forward blindly without understanding. Tools like Radian 6 are an obvious step towards taking what, until now, has been mostly random qualitative information found through social media, and turning it into qualitative charts, graphs and numbers. This will only serve to encourage the use of social media monitoring and will increase efficiency, accuracy and return on investment, all things that the dominant coalition love to hear.

My question is more of a comment/suggestion. Although I enjoyed the Radian 6 presentation and can tell in theory that it seems like an amazing tool, a lot of the presentation I just didn't understand at all. I think it was because as a large class I could not see all of the tools and options she was showing on the big screen and without being able to see or interact with the interface, I didn't get much out of it besides knowing that there are some great tools out there to monitor social media. This is absolutely something I would like to learn more about because it is probably the single most important thing to understand going into a corporate culture with the intention of working with social media. I hope that we can go further into this topic and some tools for measurement in class.