Measurement continues to be a hot topic for social media marketing these days, and rightfully so. Without accurate measurement, it’s hard to determine ROI for marketing campaigns, brands, and traditional PR outreach.

There are many tools available, Buzz Metrics, Buzz Logic, Scout Labs and Collective Intellect. Radian6 is a fast growing tool aimed at marketing and PR professionals, to help them manage and monitor their own brand and their clients.

Jason Falls already posted a great video and interview with Radian6’s CEO Marcel LeBrun, and Kami Huyse showed off its capabilities with the media snackers meme (remember that?). Even Todd Defren is discussing why he chose Radian6 for his social media monitoring.

I had the opportunity to be introduced to Radian6 at NewCommForum last week, and now that I finally got a chance to see what all the buzz was about, and I’m glad I did.

Radian6 in essence allows you to:

• Easily define topics you wish to monitor. Keywords could include names of brands, companies, products, competitors, issues, campaigns, spokespeople, executives or anything else that requires monitoring.
• Understand the impact of each piece of content on a client’s interests. As content is discovered, the solution automatically and continually tracks comments, viewership, user engagement and other metrics, 24/7, so that you can clearly see the reach and affect each post has on the community.
• Easily export data and analysis using a variety of formats for use in reports, presentations and spreadsheets.

The main appeal of Radian6 (for me) is the ability to generate, then send out search results that make sense. For example, I can set up a profile to monitor “social media” and “Radian6″, and get a variety of results from blogs, video, photos, and micromedia sites (Twitter). I can take this information and turn it into a chart that shows trends over time through frequency of mentions, or one that compares frequency of keywords through an easy to read cloud. I can compare information over time, and narrow my search as tight as I need to.

Set Up

Configuration of keywords is easy. Radian6 also allows you to filter by language, region/country, and media type (blogs & forums, video, images, online mainstream news, and micromedia). You can enter in keywords similar to how you would execute a Google or Technorati search, and a nice preview function allows you to see if you should narrow your search.

There is also an equalizer option that allows you to weight posts, number of comments and unique comments, inbound links, and average engagement (length of comment).

Tools for Measurement

The Dashboard is where you will spend most of your time, and the left sidebar (or widget doc) hosts the tools you will use to view your search results. A Topic Cloud, Comparative Topic Monitor, Topic Trends, River of News, and Influence Viewer are all at your disposal. This is where you will be able to easily generate charts and graphs to show frequency of results and comparative data by date.

(Click for full size picture)

Buzz Meter Ranking: 3 out of 4 Buzz Bees

Positive: Radian6 offers cool charts, comprehensive search functions, and the ability to share your results with colleagues. It’s easy to configure your searches, and you can even dig deeper through the individual widget tools. Radian6 offers results in a 3 month rolling calendar, so you can have a snapshot of how your keywords are trending.

Negative: The tool is user friendly…if you are technically-savvy. It is a little difficult to figure out, but if you consider the general audience for users (PR and marketing professionals), most should be fairly comfortable with a computer. Otherwise, it’s a little bit difficult, as the widget windows flip back and forth and you have to know how to do that to edit information.