The fourth step in the RACE process is evaluation.  As PR practitioners, how do we measure our efforts, especially when it comes to social media? This is where media monitoring services come in.

One such service is Radian6.  Based out of New Brunswick, according to their website:

Radian6’s user-friendly web dashboard allows topics to be quickly setup for monitoring, queries and analysis.  Use it to uncover seemingly hidden issues and trends that could affect strategic directions for clients.  Easily share analysis with clients and others to support your recommendations and proposals. 

Radian6 allows PR professionals the ability to monitor all forms of social media including blogs, top video sharing sites, forums, opinion and review sites, image sharing sites, microblogging sites, online mainstream media and other sites as they become available. The process of discovery and collection is a 24/7 process, with data pushed to your dashboard in real-time, as it is captured. Practitioners are able to analysis the data that was collected and share the findings with the given client in various forms. 

There are numerous partnerships with media monitoring companies and PR practitioners.  One example of this is the Toronto-based Social Media Group (SMG).  SMG has recently partnered with Radian6 to provide their clients with what they see as “the best in breed third-party vendors and professional organizations in order to offer maximum value to our network,” according to Maggie Fox.  SMG hopes to use the dashboard for her clients Ford and Yamaha Motors.

Another company that is using Radian6 is Carmichael Lynch (CL). CL is currently utilizing Radian6 with a number of clients and will be rolling it out to additional clients as part of its emerging and social media practice.   CL is an award-winning agency out of Minneapolis.  They help to build brands such as Harley-Davidson, Subaru, Hasbro and many others.  According to CL’s research strategist Herb Sawyer:

For our clients, it isn’t enough to simply track how often various brands are mentioned in social media but how consumers are engaging with these brands. Radian6 provides us with in-depth, real-time analysis by topic or brand and allows us to determine which sites are influencing consumer opinion the most. As a result Carmichael Lynch has the ability to uncover timely strategic insights to help our clients properly position and market themselves both online and off.

So what does this evaluation tool mean to me? As a budding PR practitioner, I see social media monitoring as an important tool for the industry to use when trying to not only establish new clientele, but retain those clients you already have.  Social media is only going to get bigger and evaluating your social media presence can help the client and their organization to join the online community’s conversation with relevant and timely responses. Evaluation through social monitoring lets organizations measure whether their online conversation is being picked-up. 

Monitoring services are an important tool for PR professionals because they help make sense of a chaotic medium.  The internet is inundated with people wanting to share and even push their opinions on others.  Measurement through third party companies like Radian6 show clients, in tangible terms, the results of PR practices, whether they were negative or positive. I believe that with the prevalence of social media in Web 2.0, social media monitoring will no longer be a niche market but a common practice for PR professionals to add to their tool list.