This tool offers a means for tracking how your brand is being talked about online, across blogs and social networks.  The benefits of this should be immediately clear, offering a means to measure brand awareness and an easy aggregation of what people (potential customers and influencers) are saying about your brand.

It all got very interesting when I learnt that 6Consulting had made an offer to Vero (the organiser of SocialMediaCamp) to create a report using Radian6 to track the conversations around the event.  Having seen the tool, I thought my skills in creating dashboards would complement it well.  Following discussions, it was agreed that 6Consulting would provide me with the raw data from Radian6 and that I would transform it into an easy to understand dashboard.

The idea I had when creating this dashboard was to segment the data in the key areas (date, sentiment and social media type) and from this to show when conversations were occurring, what the median being used for this conversation was and the nature of the conversation.  The end result can be seen below with a PDF version available for download by clicking on SocialMediaCamp London Dashboard Download.

Note that this dashboard was built around an event with a short period during which there were conversations.  A similar dashboard would be produced for the online discussions around a brand but using consistent time periods, either weeks or months.  This would allow for the tracking of trends over time, with it being immediately obvious if there has been a shift in the perception of the brand.  Any change to a metric within the dashboard would then be investigated in more detail using the Radian6 tool.

Like all data, it is pointless measuring and reporting on it if the information from the data is not used to make decisions.  From this data, the key insights and recommendations that I would make for the future are:

• The majority of comments were being made live via twitter, 13% of all mentions were during one half hour period (involving a game of bingo).  It would be useful to have a moderator participating in these discussions, highlighting key points using twitter and also writing a blog post that summarises twitter conversation.  This could be published at the end of the day or even every couple of hours if the conversation is very heavy.
• While most twitter comments are made immediately, blog posts are generally written post the event and can be a number of days after the event.  Therefore a method of listing/highlighting all these posts to the attendees of the event should not be distributed until a few days after the event.  It would be interesting to see if there would then be a second peak in conversation, especially around comments appearing on blogs, at that point.
• Negative comments were in a minority and should be examined individually for potential improvements for future events.