Unless you’re a company willing to spend $12k per month just to operate a high end ORM tool, you’ve used any one of several dozen monitoring tools and then ventured out into the World Wide Web to respond to comments made about your company, products, and industry.

That is about to change. The most innovative Reputation Monitoring tool since Visible Technologies high-end TruVoice is about to hit the scene in April. Radian6 has announced the all new Engagement Console, which claims to put all the functionality you’ll need for social media engagement and puts it into a desktop application multiple people can operate simultaneously.

This is an oversimplification, but imagine taking TweetDeck and adding global social monitoring tools to it. That’s what it looks like to me.

But What Is It?

What is unclear is to what level the user will be able to engage in blog comments, forum replies, and various social networking comments through the console. What impressed me most about Visible Technologies’ expensive ORM tool is that the user can literally respond to anything at any time because the dashboard has the ability to break captchas and auto-create profiles in order to allow the user to respond without leaving the VT dashboard.

I don’t think Radian6 is claiming to have arrived at this level yet. And let’s be honest; if they do, the price will go up likely until it’s just as out of reach as VT is to most companies.

The real benefits of this new console will be real-time collaboration within the company and enhanced abilities to engage the public through Twitter and Facebook.

I’m willing to demo the console and get a hands on feel for what it can really do. But even with a demo, ultimately, i’m still waiting for an affordable version of VT’s gorgeous ORM tool.