David Alston / Radian6 Interview

As I mentioned in the post below, I had the chance to interview David Alston and Geoff Livingston on Thursday.  I wanted to start with a short post and say thanks to David of Radian6 for his insights.

Suffice to say I'm impressed with how well Radian6's technology helps brands, PR firms, etc truly hear, evaluate and utilize the conversations being shared about their products/services online.  However, I have to say that as a somewhat jaded (been in 'new media' since 2005) practicioner and preacher of the benefits of social platforms, it was really refreshing to head David talk about how appreciated he and Radian6 are when customers say nice things about them online.  I'm misquoting him (listen to the interview below or on my Tactical Transparency show page on BlogTalkRadio for his exact words), but essentially he said near the end of the interview that if people want to know about Radian 6 he will often tell them to Google 'Radian 6' and have potential customers/whoever make their own decision about their company from what they read on the first few pages of Google.

How well would you or your organization fare if your main opinion was formed by others with what hits came up on Google?  There's some fireworks to blow your mind.

Lastly we talked about Radian6's new interface for live events called Twebinars.  I participated in the event Radian6 did (The Rockstars of Social CRM) with Chris Brogan (who helped invent the idea) and it was pretty cool.  They used Ustream in the upper left hand corner and had a moderator tweet questions while people were requested to hastag their answers.  The effect made me feel like I was on Tweetdeck or Seesmic but the content was specific to the event at hand.  I think this will be an excellent tool for brands and for the myriad communicator-types within org's saying, "I don't get Twitter."  My answer - try a twebinar and you can calculate your ROI (at least in terms of immediate engagement) in the hour or two it takes you to run an event.

Here's David's Show:

Comments

[David Alston]

Hey there John,

Thanks so much for the kind words. I'm really glad some of my points resonated during the interview. If brands are indeed the sum of all conversations then I might as well point folks to Google or any social network because that's what will truly reveal what our brand is all about.

And thanks also for the feedback on the Twebinar format. I was just meeting with our Twebinar developers last week on a few more enhancements so I'm looking forward to using it a lot more in the coming months. Looking forward to making sure the BTR live format is also able to be used in the "live" window on the app as well.

Talk soon.

Cheers.
@davidalston
Radian6