Jeff Zabin

Radian6’s solution for social media monitoring was never the most elegant one on the market. The interface was nothing special. The platform lacked a lot of the bells and whistles seen elsewhere. And, unlike some of the other big players, there was no professional services arm to do the heavy lifting in terms of generating actionable insights. Instead, users were on their own to sift though the universe of consumer-generated content, to make sense of it and to respond to it however they deemed fit.

Forget about reports with in-depth analysis of influence metrics or presentations that revealed emerging trends and new consumer insights. Radian6 was focused on providing real-time conversation engagement, plain and simple, and at a price that most companies could easily afford.

Clearly, the...

Omnicom Group announced on Wednesday that its Diversified Agency Services business has bought Communispace, a leader in the online customer communities space. An early pioneer, having launched in 1999, Communispace has created online communities for more than 100 major brands.

While the terms were undisclosed, we know that 2010 revenues were somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million. And having last month conducted an analyst briefing with Jennifer Buatti, who deserves a lot of credit for having spearheaded Communispace’s new look and feel and who recently took the reins as VP, marketing, we also know that the vendor is continuing to enjoy a nice growth trajectory (as are a number of other vendors in this space) in 2011.

The acquisition makes a lot of sense. With Omnicom’s global resources at its disposal, Communispace will have the opportunity to not only expand operations but also better serve its clients, at least in theory, by providing access to a host of...