AMD uses Radian6 as a preferred 'listening' engine
Technology provider AMD had no such fears when instituting a social media program, but it had a significant advantage: it’s always been engaged in “social media,” even before the popular term was coined, with its expansive user communities.
Chris James, social media and community strategist at AMD, is responsible for leading the social media charge. His objective is to utilize social media across all points of marketing and public relations to reduce costs by scaling and getting in better touch with customers. James is also responsible for driving information about the marketplace back into the business, and says that while other businesses leap first into creating a presence with social media tools, the company’s first objective was to determine what was being said, by whom, and where it was all taking place.
“Our core need is to engage in listening and utilizing as much as we can of what’s going on out in social media to inform business decisions – whether its messages and marketing, language and press releases, customer insights, and so on,” he said.
As an example, James tells of the first major social experiment of which the company partook during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year. AMD had several products launching at the event, so as a concentrated study and analysis of social media conversations, they deployed a team and Radian6, a social media monitoring and measurement company, to help them track what was happening around the event.
AMD built an on-site “war room” at the show at which they could monitor all of the conversations happening at the show. The monitoring team, which consisted of marketing, PR and product representatives, listened for:
• Share of conversation • Product mentions • Relevant conversations • Brand associations
Listening in with Radian 6 was so successful, and gave them such great insight into what was being discussed about them, that the marketing team has taken its use of Radian6 and grown it from a single event monitoring tool to a long-term engagement platform for the company.
“Most people internally have seen the benefit and it’s so easy to communicate the benefit,” James said. “When I did a report that counted the mentions at CES and sent screenshots from Radian6 to all of marketing, all of a sudden there was a corporate-wide epiphany on how you can capture conversations. Now we’ve been flooded with requests across the globe – how can we give others access to this data? Months later we’re still working with those groups on their requests.”
James said that while they don’t yet have strict ROI measurement of their use of Radian6, he said that it’s been tremendously easier to manage and more cost-effective than hiring a group of analysts to try and make sense of it all.
“I can say that we don’t see Radian6 as something we can do without,” James said. “The initial cost is relatively low compared to its competitors and the benefits are greater.”
However, James also cautions that Radian6, while definitely beneficial, is not a silver bullet.
“There are some things that Radian6 does really well and some things it takes a lot of effort to do well,” he said. “Radian6 is a daily use tool but it can’t authoritatively speak to the big pictures and it is labor intensive to try to do that. We’re considering other options to bring in and use in concert with Radian6 to get that bigger picture.”