The Radian6 vs. SM2 Death Match: Price

Radian6 and Techrigy both sell their systems based on the quantity of results. For $600 a month, you can have unlimited search terms and an unlimited number of users to examine 10,000 SM2 results (agency-specific discounts are also available). Radian6 charges $500 a month to examine 10,000 net new results, but you only get one user (it costs an extra $100 per user that you add). So, you will likely share the one Radian6 login among many members of your team and take turns using it.

The big difference between each system isn’t the cost; it is how each system chooses to handle the results. With Radian6 there is no limit to the total number of stored results you can view, because the system does not delete older results and there is no need to pay more to keep historical results. In fact, your results (and associated notes, tags, metrics) are retained as long as your topic profile remains active.

For example, take a topic which typically generates a monthly volume of conversations at 10,000 posts per month. After 6 months, in Radian6, the user will have access to all data from the date the profile was created (70,000 results) and the monthly price doesn’t change. After one year, more than 130,000 results would be available, and would continue to grow without any change in price.

SM2, however, caps your results. So when you’ve reached the ceiling, no new results will be entered into your system. It’s very easy to reach your result limit, what with the faulty results coming in foreign languages. So, expect to spend a lot of your time removing bad content from the system just to make more room for fresh results. In theory, with SM2 you could save your results to your computer and free up more space. But that’s a time-intensive process, and you may not always know what you were looking for when you reexamine them.

WINNER for Price: Tie, but consider your account team size first.

Conclusion
Radian6 and SM2 tied on functionality, Radian6 won on ease of use, and price was a tie, so there’s no clear winner of this Death Match. While I started out using SM2 because it felt less cluttered and claimed to automate sentimentality, its user interface is actually more challenging and requires a lot of training to become a true social Ninja (visit this site to get started).

Since both companies don’t really have true reach or sentimentality mastered, you will probably wind up using Radian6 because it enables you to do social media marketing for which you need to stay current with content to re-purpose around the web and work with influencers. I was an early adopter of Radian6 and migrated to SM2, but I’m leaning on Radian6 more to handle my day-to-day work. (When my trial period ended, I found myself wanting them back, which is a good an indicator of their usefulness.) SM2 takes more time and effort to learn, and frankly we all don’t have the time.

Radian6 delivers the easier user experience that a Mac fan would love, and sometimes SM2 is like the doughy PC character played by John Hodgman in the Mac vs. PC ads. Both systems have their merits, and both are imperfect in their own ways. I plan to use a wide range of tools as I search for perfection, realizing that nothing can capture the full scope of measurement. While I listen to the world online and choose to engage, inspire, build and mobilize with the masses, I expect social media monitoring to grow with me, and the future looks bright.