BuzzLogic Goes Beyond The Hype
Buzzlogic is a company that recently launched a private beta at Demo and while I noticed them during the Demo media blitz, I didn’t really take much time to think about their business model until Read / Write / Web featured an interview with their Co-Founder Mitch Ratcliffe. In a nutshell the company seeks to automatically identify the influencers for specific brands and industries. This analysis goes way beyond traffic analyzation and looks at the quality of an idea being presented, the direct sphere of influence that a blogger may have and the impact that mainstream journalism may play on a brand.
“We’re seeking influencers in conversational markets, giving them more power and marketers better insight into how to deploy their limited resources to deal with the explosion of incredibly specific feedback that companies, organizations and political campaigns are receiving through social media. The tools we’re building will be applied to many of the challenges we talk about with social media, such as valuing individual contributions to the conversation, rather than just traffic – and how to interact through a dynamic personal form of communication in order to get the results you aim for.”
There have been a lot of companies that offers blog consulting services on the web, but the reason why I find Buzzlogic so interesting is that they don’t try to identify what the top stories are, but rather who the top contributors are and the scope of their influence. Essentially, they are offering a way to not just look at what bloggers are saying about a company, but to give companies a sense of what those bloggers RSS feeds may look like and who may have the greatest impact on their brand image.
BuzzLogic’s reports go beyond just identifying which stories have the most traffic and instead attempts to find out who the big fish in the small ponds are. One of the more controversial measurements that BuzzLogic takes into account is the impact that splogs play on brand image. Some might argue that Sploggers shouldn’t really get consideration in an analysis on influence, but splogs are clearly getting traffic or they wouldn’t exist, so if someone writes something and it gets picked up by the splogosphere, then it does add to the impact that this buzz has on a company or brand. Bloggers may hate splogs, but if you’re brand is negatively or positively featured by a blogger who is heavily splogged, then the splogs can work as an amplifier of sorts. The whole business concept is pretty fascinating and I know that I would love to see what BuzzLogic thinks my own sphere of influence may look like, but curious bloggers will have to wait for now because the company is focusing their beta for PR and marketing executives.
As more and more businesses continue embracing the blogs, it is going to become increasingly important for their PR teams to develop relationships with those writers. Some companies may use this data to ghost sites for good ideas while others will embrace bloggers and try to develop relationships, but either way, if the service works as advertised, this tool could save companies a lot of time when it comes to figuring out which sites really matter and which sites are producing noise.
Posted on October 9th, 2006 by Davis
Filed under: Marketing, Web 2.0