Radian6 Philippines

Radian6 is the leading industry-standard tool in social listening. What is it? What can it do for your brand? Digital marketing is all about keeping your ears on the ground and listening. The technological trends and breakthroughs in social listening has made it possible for brands to get real-time feedback from consumers and can enhance so many aspects of how they do business: R&D, real-life marketing, traditional advertising, customer service, competition analysis, etc.

Salesforce video on what Radian6 is

So what is it? How come not many people are talking about it? Not even a lot of people who are well-versed in traditional marketing know what it is. Many brands are already using it here in the Philippines and, in fact, even politicians have already used it. Something I discussed in my article about Social Listening in the Philippines.

I've talked about how Nescafe has already used it in the link above. It's actually the best example on how marketing has been transformed from a lot of talking to a lot of listening. They used to market their canned coffee as "coffee in a can" and after using social listening tools figured out that more of their consumers called it iced coffee (I don't know if this is real-time data cause I personally call it 'canned coffee'). The lesson you can take from this is that listening to what social is saying can drastically affect your marketing and advertising plan as a whole. It is real-time before and after sales feedback from those loyal to your brand, those who are loyal to your competitor's brand, and those who don't know about your brand yet.

The tool we use at work, Lithium Social Web, also harnesses its power. For someone like me, I get overloaded on data when I think about the possibilities of what you can do with Radian6. In our case, we use it for customer service, which is also very obvious as you can engage social media influencers. Because it can categorize and filter based on positive and negative sentiment, you can see who are naturally being your brand ambassadors and those who are experiencing basic or even bad service with your brand. 

Basically, it's a very advanced, specific, and customizable search engine for all social media. And this is not limited to Facebook or Twitter. I'm talking about what we once called "Web 2.0" as whole. It is all interactive and social content online. Forums, Blogs, video hosting sites, etc. And since it's highly customizable, you can use it in a variety of ways to improve your brand and see where the market is dictating your brand should go. 

A lot of brands here in the Philippines are already investing in social listening. It's not even accurate to say that we are behind when it comes to social media as Filipinos are very fond of social media. Even politicians are starting to realize how they can exploit this technology to their advantage. Most of those running for the Philippine senate are used Radian6 in their campaign.

Smartphones and access to internet is getting cheaper and a lot more are getting access. I very excited on how this will shape the market and how companies will utilize this tool. Inevitably, these kinds of social listening tools will have to lower their prices and more will have access to them. This is always the trend in technology when it is allowed to flourish freely. As I have mentioned in my previous post about The Vatican Tapping Social Media, it is all becoming so democratized and people are becoming empowered.

Eventually, this will all have to be free or be very affordable or the ones that are free and affordable now will innovate and be as competitive as the expensive ones. We are currently in a very interactive and social phase in this technological revolution that is the internet and Radian6 is definitely something that will be very notable in future history books when they look back at what changed the game.