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New Brunswick company gives customers more ability to track return on web investment

Radian6's latest addition to its social media monitoring service brings marketers one step closer breaking down the professions biggest barrier, a leading Canadian marketing professor says.

The New Brunswick firm is now giving its customers more ability to track its return on investments, at least online, by incorporating web analytics.

"We're integrating the social metrics we collect about how many people are saying what about you (on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and other similar sites) with activity on your website," Radian6 chief executive Marcel LeBrun said. "Now you know which articles drove which people to cause which actions on your website."

This will allow marketers to more effectively spend their time and energy, he said on the phone from Boston last week where he made the announcement at an enterprise 2.0 conference.

"This is the kind of idea that social media really needs right now," Queen's University marketing professor Ken Wong said.

While the new service will allow companies to know how publicity on the web translates into online sales, anonymous in-store customers who may have been sold on the product online still aren't easily traceable.

Because of this Wong said the service isn't a complete solution because there isn't one, as marketers won't ever likely know exactly what customers are thinking. But he said every step towards it is worthwhile if companies can afford it.

"If they're doing something to enhance the response ability, then that's a step in the right direction," he said.

Though companies have been tracking click activity online for years, LeBrun said the Internet has changed and web analytics should follow.

"It used to be that your website was your embassy on the Internet," he said. "But now you have outposts on all these social networks."

"We're producing that picture of what's happening not just on your website but everywhere," he said.

And it's not just being shown to marketers and executives.

Radian6 also made additions to the service that allows sales and customer service agents to leverage the power of monitoring the social web.

By integrating a popular customer relationship management system with its social media monitoring service companies can know more about their customers.

"They'll be able to see who they are online. Not just here's their account number and here's their phone number, but here's where they blog, here's where they tweet, and this is what they've been talking about," LeBrun said. "You have a better context to build a relationship and to connect with the customer."

Radian6 struck a deal with Salesforce, a popular customer relationship management system, but LeBrun said he plans to collaborate with other systems in the future. Wong said this addition is also great as it connects the conversation between a customer and company on both the marketing and customer service sides.

"It brings social media closer to delivering on its potential," he said.