New Brunswick Success Story Radian6

Sean Mitton, Canadian Expat Network

Innovation was one of the key focuses of this year's SEUS-CP Conference in Fredericton. One of the most compelling sessions included Gerry Pond, Chairman of Mariner Partners Inc and Chris Ramsey, co-founder of Radian6. Pond has over 40 years of IT experience and has been the President of Aliant Telecom and CEO of NBTel. In addition to this, he's been a part of 10 IT startups and that includes investment into Ramsey's Radian6 which was recently sold to Salesforce.com for a reported $340 million dollars.

The crowd of over 300 listened intently to Ramsey's story of Radian6 and how they were able to become a great success story for New Brunswick. Radian6 is a social media monitoring company that is used by over 2,700 customers including over half of the Fortune 100 companies and promoted by over 20 channel partners.

Chris Ramsey Photo from NB Business Journal

Like many companies, the concept for Radian6 began in a coffee shop and not surprisingly, in a very Canadian way, took place at a Tim Horton's in downtown Fredericton. For Ramsey, the market for the concept evolved. One of the initial thoughts was that it could help cities in regards to fighting crime through social media monitoring.

As the idea became more baked in, they found their niche in corporate enterprise. In an effort to grow their company, they wanted their first client to carry some weight in the industry to help provide valuable feedback to shape their offering, but also provide much needed credibility. "We were fortunate to have Weber Shandwick come on board", Ramsey states. "One of the largest US agencies.

That was an important event in the company's growth as well as what Ramsey called the "early adopter program". "We asked several agencies for their time in giving feedback on our offering in exchange for the use of the service for a limited time. That strategy worked very well as we got tremendous feedback and many of them eventually became paying customers.

Ramsey shares that today there are estimated 342 competitors. They continue to stay ahead of competition by releasing new features every 2 weeks and have formed a reputation over the last few years as leaders in their space. For purchasers of social media monitoring, he compared it to the days when people wouldn't get fired for buying IBM.

While Radian6 is now a subsidiary of Salesforce.com, it continues to operate separately and looks forward to hiring 100 more employees in Fredericton, NB this year.