Rising Stars: The Easy Listener

Are you listening—really listening—to the social Web? If not, try listening to Radian6, because the social media monitoring provider could help you listen better. 

Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal at CRM consultancy Beagle Research Group, calls Radian6 “one of the few social media companies that understands the importance of listening before speaking.” In fact, in the sea of vendors offering some form of listening platform—“one of the most important areas of social CRM,” says Brent Leary, cofounder of CRM Essentials—Radian6 belongs to the subset that holistically approaches the progression of listening, learning, and then applying. (One of last year’s Rising Stars, Visible Technologies, is another.) “Social listening holds the key to optimizing interactions with customers and prospects,” Leary says, “and…many companies are [using Radian6] to gain important insight that can help create meaningful engagement opportunities.”

“Radian6 has already shown that [merely] monitoring the pulse of the vibrant social Web will not be enough,” says Ian Jacobs, senior analyst at Ovum. “It’s leading the way toward making monitoring the first step toward actionable information.”

“Radian6 has grown immensely over the last year, now owning one of the largest pieces of the social media listening market,” says Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Its intuitive dashboard makes anyone new to social feel like they can manage their brand within vast amounts of data, its competitive pricing [provides] a low cost of entry into the social media monitoring world, [and] its features are broad enough to apply to the many, varied use cases for social media data.” Despite what Hofer-Shall calls an overly simplistic approach, Radian6 “is positioned well to compete in today’s market…and has a strong roadmap to guide marketers’ future needs—like its focus toward integrating social data into CRM systems.” 

“Radian6 has done the best job in preparing for the enterprise market,” says Ray Wang, a partner at Altimeter Group. “Its partnerships and business development strategy put it in the lead.” 

Suresh Vittal, a Forrester Research vice president and practice leader serving customer intelligence professionals, says Radian6 has “really impressed in the past year in how quickly the platform has developed to support almost endless drilldowns and ‘train-of-thought’ analysis. Their latest engagement platform is an innovative attempt to bring social media data to customer service and to bring much needed process and workflow to managing the social presence of brands.” 

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