Last Thursday, The MaRS Discovery District opened its doors to the Canadian Innovation Exchange. In its fourth year, the CIX is really just a great excuse to bring together some of Canada’s hottest startups in the digital media and information technology landscape. Toronto Standard sat down to talk with Marcel Lebrun, CEO of Radian6, who delivered the opening speech to a standing room only audience. What is Radian6?We are a social media monitoring company. We answer the question: How do you create loyal customers, and how do you build a community out of this base? Customers will complain wherever they want and it is up to you to find them. Our technology helps find these customers and meet them at their point of need. Over half of Fortune100 companies are Radian6 clients. How does it work? We help companies transform how they communicate with customers. New marketing is found in listening, and our listening platform helps tech companies understand the voice of their customers on social networks. So think blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn. Your role must have changed after Salesforce.com bought Radian6 for $326-mln (U.S.) in March, arguably one of the largest exits for a Canadian tech company. What do you do now? I am still the CEO of Radian6. We are now a business unit within Salesforce, where we run the Social Marketing Cloud. The Social Marketing Cloud is where all tech CMOs need to grow, which is where, to use a Gretzky term, the puck is going. No more email blasts and banner ads in the highway. What are some meta trends you’ve spotted in the social media space? Cloud. Social. Mobile. Location, so location aware apps. And what I call “natural gamefication.” I differentiate it from normal gamefication, which is what FourSquare is, and in my opinion, too playful. I am interested in figuring out how to best align gamefication with the real world. I think there is an opportunity to have softwares encourage real world results through gamefication but not to make it so playful that the game becomes the end. Those are the five hot areas in my mind. When was the last time you were impressed? Can you give us an example of an effective use of social marketing in recent memory? Every day I am amazed. Companies are doing incredible things all the time. Take KLM, the Dutch airline. They introduced what they call the KLM Surprise. When customers are traveling and they mention KLM on Twitter or FourSquare, they try to find them and give them a little prize. It’s a little thing, but it is a thing that shows that the company is listening. Trust in the institution is on the decline. Decisions have shifted to I don’t trust companies, but I do trust what my friends recommend. Advocacy is the new currency. That’s why companies have to elevate the voice of customers and nurture advocacy on the web. Does Raidan6 have a founding myth? Please don’t tell me it came together over late night drinks at a dinner party like every other startup. Close! The number six comes from the six people who used meet at Tim Horton’s. So Tim Horton’s was the first office of the company. I think I have a picture somewhere of Chris Newton with a Tim Horton’s cup. We spent some time there, beating around a whole bunch of ideas, and this is the one that emerged. We landed on the name Radian6 after that. There is a true story and a made up story. Give me the true story first. The true story is that it was randomly picked because it sounds good and we went with it. The lie that I’ve made up is that radian is a unit of measure, and six radian forms a perfect symmetry. What has being from the Maritimes meant for Radian6? We will remain in Atlantic Canada. There is a good customer service culture there, which helped us assemble a loyal team. When Salesforce acquired the company, they were astounded to learn that only two or three engineers had left the company in its entire history, which is rare. Our competitive advantage against companies in the [Silicon] Valley is that there, you are competing against Google and Facebook for talent, and are losing people all the time. You also have to match those companies on the pay front, which gets very expensive. Here, we can build a more loyal team by attracting smart people who really just wants to work for a cool company. I’ve heard you be referred to as a serial entrepreneur. Are you thinking of starting something new? One reason why we sold to Salesforce versus Microsoft say, is because I wanted a cultural fit and a vision fit where our employees would continue to grow and deliver value. When Marc [Benioff, CEO of Salesforce] came along, he told me that whatever it is that made Radian6 magical, he wanted to keep. We feel like we can really change the world. We want to change how marketing and customer engagement happens. As long as I get to do that, I am staying put where I am. Update: The Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) announced the 2011 CIX People’s Choice — Wattpad and Wave Accounting — selected from Canada’s 20 most innovative technology companies showcasing live at this year’s event. Using a virtual social stock market platform, these two companies had the highest stock value at the end of the day. Three companies — Nexalogy Environics, Recoset and TribeHR – also received honours with placements at the Canadian Technology Accelerator in Silicon Valley. Allen Lau, CEO & Co-founder of Wattpad allowed the audience to discover a new form of entertainment, where users can interact and share stories across text, video, images and through conversations with other readers and writers. Wattpad allows you to discover new stories, connect with readers and writers and create your own on wattpad.com. www.wattpad.com Kirk Simpson, Co-Founder & CEO of Wave Accounting makes accounting easy for everyone, with the fastest-growing online accounting tool for small businesses around the world. Wave is 100% free, offers simple complete accounting, and is designed for the real-world needs of small business owners. Wave uses an innovative business model that allows them to provide the product for free – not just a free trial but actually 100% free. The People’s Choice Winners were awarded as the two companies with the highest virtual valuations at the close of the event. Throughout the day, more than 400 CIX attendees bid virtual currency on the CIX Top 20 as each company presented to other entrepreneurs and investors about what makes them the “one to watch” in the coming year.