A chat with the CEO of Radian6 from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

CEO Mar­cel LeBrun on how com­pa­nies should lis­ten, mon­i­tor and engage with customers

I’m still get­ting out from under the atomic dust­bin that is my home office. It’s been an insanely busy year, from the relaunch of Socialmedia.biz as a dis­trib­uted con­sult­ing firm to the launch of Socialbrite.org as a non­profit learn­ing hub to my orga­niz­ing the Trav­el­ing Geeks trip to Lon­don last July, so I’m just now get­ting to a num­ber of fan­tas­tic video inter­views I should have pub­lished weeks ago.

I sat down with Mar­cel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, the well-respected social media mon­i­tor­ing com­pany — he calls it “a lis­ten­ing and engage­ment plat­form,” which is an apt way to describe it — at the 140 Char­ac­ter con­fer­ence in New York. Another in Jeff Pulver’s Twitter-centric 140 Char­ac­ter con­fer­ence series is tak­ing place in Tel Aviv today.

“More and more com­pa­nies are real­iz­ing that the social Web is trans­form­ing how they inter­act with cus­tomers.”
– Mar­cel LeBrun
CEO, Radian6

Often, brands start out by try­ing to use interruption-based push mar­ket­ing approaches on blogs, Face­book and Twit­ter. It doesn’t work. “More and more com­pa­nies are real­iz­ing that the social Web is trans­form­ing how they inter­act with cus­tomers,” LeBrun says. “They’re start­ing to lis­ten to those con­ver­sa­tions and engage.”

Watch, down­load or embed the video on Vimeo

In our chat, LeBrun describes the Yel­low Brick Road for brands — a five-step strat­egy that com­pa­nies should apply when enter­ing the realm of social media:

• Step 1 is lis­ten­ing. Your brand becomes the sum of the con­ver­sa­tions about your company.

• Step 2 is where you move to the respond­ing stage. “You need to let peo­ple know that you’re lis­ten­ing,” LeBrun says.

• Step 3 is where you move into full par­tic­i­pa­tion once you under­stand what your cus­tomers are say­ing about you.

• Step 4 is the stage in which you tell your story. “You give peo­ple a glimpse into the pas­sion behind your vision and the peo­ple behind your com­pany,” he says.

• Step 5 is where you take a broader look at your company’s place in the sec­tor and “start con­tribut­ing value to the kinds of things your com­mu­nity cares about,” he says.

Social media and ROI

LeBrun reminds com­pa­nies that when incor­po­rat­ing social media, return on invest­ment must be based on your busi­ness goals. “The social Web is mov­ing its way into every busi­ness func­tion that touches the cus­tomer,” he says. That includes cus­tomer sup­port, PR, mar­ket­ing, sales and other areas. So you have to look at social media in con­text: What does it cost to do cus­tomer sup­port with social media vs. cus­tomer sup­port with a tra­di­tional call center?

There’s a dizzy­ing array of both paid and free social media mon­i­tor­ing ser­vices in the mar­ket­place today. Nielsen Buzz­met­rics and TNS Cym­fony are among the other big play­ers in the space; LeBrun says their spe­cialty is pro­vid­ing research reports and in-depth analy­sis of influ­ence met­rics over time, while Radian6 is more focused on con­ver­sa­tion engage­ment on the real-time Web.

Based in New Brunswick, Canada, Radian6 helps brands aggre­gate all the con­ver­sa­tions tak­ing place about your brand — in blogs, on video shar­ing sites and social net­works, on micro-networks — and then helps you ana­lyze those con­ver­sa­tions and deter­mine how to respond. It offers a Web-based dash­board that lets you set up top­ics, offers met­rics around those areas of inter­est and then pro­vides work­flow tools to help you assign tasks to dif­fer­ent col­leagues or employ­ees so that you can record who’s engag­ing with whom.

Related arti­cles by Zemanta

• More on using Radian6 to col­lect Video Views (webmetricsguru.com)
• Is Social Media Worth Your Time? (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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