Internet N.B.-based company providing services to world's largest media monitoring firm for corporate communications

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John Pollack
Telegraph-Journal

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Radian6 is providing social media monitoring services for Cision, the world's largest media monitoring firm for corporate communications and public relations professionals.

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Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun. The Fredericton-based company is providing social media monitoring services to Cision.

This will provide Frederiction-based Radian6 with some promising new opportunities.

"It's quite significant for us," chief executive officer Marcel LeBrun said, "The size of the organization and their customer base ... means a whole lot of new customers for us."

It will also helps make social media monitoring more mainstream, LeBrun said.

"Here's a player who's really well known in more traditional media who has now launched a new social media product," he said. "It really creates a lot of awareness to a lot of their customers who may not have social media on their radar."

For Cision it will mean a drastic increase in the number of blogs it monitors.

"We already monitor thousands of blogs, but Radian6 is up to almost 100 million," said executive vice-president Peter Granat. "It's a great expansion for us."

On top of blogs Cision will now also monitor tens of thousands of online forums, over 20,000 online media sources, over 450 leading rich media sites, top microblogging sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed, and LinkedIn and video- and image-sharing sites including YouTube and Flickr.

"That's important for our clients when they're trying to track what's being said about their brands or their competitors' brands and keep track of consumer opinion," he said.

The extra service has been launched in North America and there are plans to expand in Great Britain, Germany and Sweden, where there worldwide headquarters is located in Stockholm.

Cision begin in 1994, with the purchase of a few media monitoring firms. In 2001 Cision purchased Bowdens Media Monitoring in Toronto and Beacon's in Chicago and Verbatim in Quebec in 2006 before changing the Worldwide name to Cision in 2007.

The company operates in the U.S., UK, Sweden, Canada, Germany, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Portugal, Lithuania, the Netherlands and China and has partners in another 125 countries. Cision has around 2,600 employees and over 30,000 clients around the world.

It's curious how an international company ended up signing a social media monitoring contact with a New Brunswick firm.

"We'd been watching Radian6 as they went to market and we have a number of overlapping customers," Granat said. "Radian6 in terms of innovation, breadth of content, and their ability to handle multiple language, was the choice that made them a good fit for Cision because of our global reach."

In addition to English-language sites, the services monitor social media across multiple languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, simple Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian.