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Marcel LeBrun of Salesforce Radian6 on the Future of Social Media Monitoring

Radian6 is one of the industry’s leading social media management platforms and was recently acquired by Salesforce.  I was invited to join Salesforce at its recent Social Advisory Board meeting during its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where I had an opportunity to sit down with Marcel LeBrun, SVP and GM of Salesforce Radian6.

As part of a special edition series of Revolution, Marcel and I discussed the evolution of monitoring and listening and the important role learning and intelligence will eventually play in the social enterprise.  Shot in front of a live audience including brand managers from the likes of Disney, Livingsocial, P&G, Get Satisfaction, and VW, we address the need for businesses to not only react to conversations but also lead them.

Everyone recognizes the customer now has control, but did we ever have control of the brand?

Season 2 – Episode 7

Season Two:
S2E1: How Mercedes Benz Successfully Uses Social Media to Engage
S2E2: Technorati’s Richard Jalichandra on the State and Future of Social Media
S2E3: Guy Kawasaki on the Art of Enchantment
S2E4: Adly CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh on the Social Era of Celebrity Endorsements
S2E5: Filmmaker and Webby Awards Founder Tiffany Shlain
S2E6: Jim Louderback, Revision3 CEO on the Future of Broadcast and Web Television – Part 1 of 2
S2E7: Jim Louderback, Revision3 CEO on the Future of Broadcast and Web Television – Part 2 of 2

Watch Season One on YouTube

Now on iTunes!

22 COMMENTS ON THIS POST To “Marcel LeBrun of Salesforce Radian6 on the Future of Social Media Monitoring”

  1. Wendy says:

    I would love to see listening applications like R6 move into the non-profit arena to help drive issues such as health disparities or organ donation (my personal passion).  How to make it afforable in these arenas?  How about a corporate responsibility engagement from SalesForce & R6?  #iwork4dell

    • Nick says:

      Hi Wendy, all these not for profit organisations need to do is use the most effective and cheapest form of research which is social data. It shouldn’t be up to the tool providers to offer their services cheaper, but for market research people to wake up and ditch the expensive focus groups, surveys and other outdated ways to gather insight.

    • Tom Messett says:

      aaand I do believe Radian6 offer a discount to not for profit organisations…

  2. Doug Ridley says:

    Another great episode. I found Marcel’s thoughts on social as THE business communication tool very interesting. It was encouraging to hear his thoughts on the future of businesses joining their consumers in thought leadership. 

  3. Brian, 

    I’m glad you asked Marcel whose job it is to apply the insight gleaned from the dashboards to key business performance metrics.. and I’m pretty sure he actually doesn’t know. He said the CMO, but I’m absolutely sure the CMO is NOT going to be the one doing the monitoring on a regular basis. The CMO just wants to know how it affects the business in less than 5 sentences. 

    “Oh we have 11,000 people saying positive things about our product xyz? That will lead to a 72% increase in leads for next quarter? We will make X more amount of dollars? Great.” That’s what a C-suite executive wants to think about. I would actually argue that the reason no one knows whose job it is yet is because social media monitoring is simply not advanced enough to generate those types of correlations… You get a great scope of who’s talking and it certainly helps with listening and engagement, but when it actually comes down to tying the unstructured data to your key business performance metrics, social media monitoring falls a bit short. 

    That’s why you need the right combination of people, process, expertise AND technology to help make those correlations. If measuring impact on the business isn’t obvious, the software really shouldn’t be worth it to the c-suite exec… 

    Social (media) business intelligence will provide the next generation of data correlation platforms. 

    Either way though, great interview Brian. You always seem to ask the right questions. 

    Cheers, 

    – Sergei Dolukhanov
    @sdolukhanov:twitter 

    • Agreeing with Sergei that Social Media intelligence will provide the next generation of data correlation platforms. The way I see social media is going is very very fast & marketing through social media will be a wise decision.

    • Davidwesson says:

      why do you think they signed a deal with sales force that because it will show them how xxx mentions of the brand actually leads to an increase in sales of xx .interesting that the whole positioning of his premise of the socila enterprise is exactly in tandem with sales for new sales pitch  

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  6. Kyle Lacy says:

    Great interview! I would also agree with Sergei that social media monitoring is not advanced to the pint of being able to decide that 11,000 people saying positive things will lead to a 72% increase in leads. If they have come to the point of being able to measure conversation from leads… from positive sentiment. AWESOME! However, I have my doubts. 

    • Agreed. While it’s getting better and better every day, it’s certainly not, in my opinion, advanced enough to be able to extrapolate 72% sales increase based on 11,000 comments. It will be amazing when sm monitoring gets to that point, as I’m sure it will.

    • I’m not sure if ‘monitoring’ ever will, but the social media business intelligence platforms may.. but I suppose its not the way you market the product, but the actual functionality of the product and correlating the data with your business that actually matters. 

  7. Nice post.Thank you for taking the time to publish this information very useful! waiting for some interesting thoughts from your side in your next post ,thanks.

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