Radian6, "a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web," just launched their new dashboard this past week to private beta (set to end in April) that brings their powerful monitoring tool to your desktop via Adobe Air.

This new tool is quite powerful. It not only tracks the conversations happening on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, mainstream news sites, forums, videos, blogs, boards, and public discussion groups but it also lets you engage your social communties straight from the interface. No more worrying about going to 10 different websites to track the latest comments on your newest YouTube video, it can be done in one place.

While the above is a strong feature, I believe the biggest benefit to any campaign team or new media shop is the ability to have a dedicated workflow. This allows you to tag, assign, and route posts to individual members of your team.

As expected it has the ability to break out the different media types into separate windows or to even break out on different keywords, tags, etc... This is very handy, if for example, you are tracking an individual item within your campaign that maybe separate from your specific message.

The cost for this product starts at $500 month for up to "10,000 net new monthly results (individual posts that match your overall profile keywords)"  From there the cost goes up to $1,000/month for 25,000 results, $1,500/mont for 50,000 results, and then $500/month extra for each 50,000 results.

So yes, it is costly but it can be a life saver if you are a smaller campaign trying to track a message within a large media market with only a few staff members.

Hattip to TechCrunch as they reported on this article, but also mentioned a few start-up companies that are challenging Radian6 in this space: ScoutLabs (starts at $199/Month), Visible Measures, Viralheat (starts at $9.99/month), HootSuite (Free), People Browsr (starts at Free).

Have you used Radian6 or any of these services? If so, were they productive for your campaign or organization?

The VAN Now Hosts Campaign Websites and Provides CRM Services for Dems

New addition to the “Winning in 2010″ discussion of website/CRM vendors — the Democratic Voter Activation Network (VAN) is now hosting campaign websites and providing CRM services to candidates, alongside such other Dem campaign packages such as Wired for Change/DLCCWeb. The VAN is much better known for its work behind the scenes providing voter-information databases to help candidates with phone-banking, block-walking and other grassroots outreach, but they’re now providing the additional site-hosting/mass-messaging services that most campaigns need.

This move adds to an array of integrated online campaign packages available to Democrats; Republican candidates seem to have access to such technological riches (they more often have to piece together a web presence using software and services from several vendors). Which R vendor will jump in and fill the gap? As a Dem, I can hope that the answer is, none of them…

Trackur = Reputation + Social Media Monitoring

Online reputation and social media monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages--including news, blogs, video, images, and forums--and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.

YouTube Interviews: Pelosi, Boehner, Reid Answer your Healthcare Questions

For over seven hours yesterday, the nation's top leaders gathered in Washington for a unique conversation on the future of health care reform. Moderated by President Obama, the healthcare summit revealed disparate views on current legislation, with Democrats arguing for comprehensive reform and Republicans pressing for a more incremental approach (or for starting over entirely). We streamed the entire summit on CitizenTube, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid all agreed to answer some of your top-voted questions from our Google Moderator platform during the event. (We also offered the opportunity to Senator Mitch McConnnell, the Senate Minority Leader, but he was unable to participate due to a scheduling conflict.)

Social Media, Huh?, What is it Good For: A Report

The non-profit IdealWare  surveyed more than 400 staffers at various non-profits back in November to find out what social media tools they're using, and whether they're finding those applications are meeting their organizational needs on three fronts: reaching new allies, fundraising, and deepening their relationships with existing supporters.

Keeping Out the Trolls: Relevancy in User-Generated Content

In the summer of 2008, J.R. Johnson sold Virtual Tourist to Expedia for $85 million dollars. While Johnson seems like the type of laid back Los Angeles entrepreneur that would take some vacation time, his quest for relevancy had him launching a new community the following March. Lunch.com is Johnson's attempt to cut through the noise that has proliferated since he first started in the user-generated-review space in 1999.

The TGIF 'Revolution' is Nothing Without a Marketing Strategy

If you were a first-time visitor from Mars and you happened to drop into a marketing meeting somewhere in the United States, you might assume that marketing people do nothing but talk about "TGIF."

That's Twitter, Google, the internet and Facebook.

There's no question these four revolutionary developments have forever changed the marketing function. Word-of-mouth has now become word of finger.

Where Money Meets New Media:  A Virginia Governor's Race Postmortem

Television is still king. Printed mailers are second in line to the throne. And somewhere, waiting out in the castle courtyard, is the joker that is new media.

That's the lesson from a close reading of the campaign finance reports filed in the race for the Governor's mansion in Virginia, a race which ended with Republican ex-State Attorney General Bob McDonnell trumping Democratic State Senator Creigh Deeds, McDonnell with 59% of the vote to Deeds' 41%.

Social Media Monitoring 101: How to Get Started

You’ve probably heard people talking about social media monitoring. It’s wise to listen to conversations before you participate in them. Social media monitoring allows you to do just that.

But many brand and marketing managers responsible for social media don’t quite understand what social media monitoring is and why it’s important. Here’s a quick primer...

And just for fun -- 

A Mad Magazine Draws 540 Caricatures for an iPhone App...

About the members of congress and Apple rejects it.

Is it fair? You decide.