Buzzlogic, a San Francisco company that tell marketers which blogs are the most influential, is now distributing its online product.
It’s looking pretty good. This is unfortunately not a free software. You’ll have to pay about $12,000 a year.
It tracks conversations around certain topics. And more than just tracking the influence of blogs, it also ranks which topics are getting attention from those influential blogs. Its strength is in the visual portrayal of these conversations and blogs. VentureBeat first covered Buzzlogic here.
(Clarification: The following description is based on a demo of the product centered around bloggers and the American Idol Contest. Buzzlogic did not give me free access to try my own searches, so it isn’t clear to me how well this technology applies beyond this example).
Take, for example, the American Idol contest. Buzzlogic lets you search the names of each of the contestants, and it tells you many blogs are linking to them. It shows how controversial and polarizing contestant Sanjaya Malakar was drawing the most attention (when we first looked at Buzzlogic a couple of weeks ago), while Melinda Doolittle was showing a strong second — even while Chris Sligh was picking up more “recent” posts than Doolittle, showing some sort of momentum. See first graphic below.
You can then find detailed information about each contestant, for example, drilling down into the posts about Melinda Doolittle. There you’ll see what words the most influential bloggers are using in posts about her. Buzzlogic also analyzes text to see whether posts are positive or negative. The posts about Sanjaya Malakar are negative, as you’ll see in the third image below.
Buzzlogic shows who is linking to each blogger, and the quality of links. See image at far bottom. If a popular blogger is getting lots of links from other bloggers, marketers can look at the quality of those incoming links to get an idea about whether that popular blogger is really as influential as they seem. It tries to distinguish between bloggers who are “on topic,” those who are “popular,” and those who are “influential.” Buzzlogic also shows the most influential blog posts on a particular topic (on the topic of Sanjaya, for example, they’re listed on left hand side of bottom image). Still, Buzzlogic has some ways to go. It still measures pure numbers, and not the type of individual readers each blogger is getting. The assumption is that numbers alone measure influence, which is true if you’re Pepsi, and want to sell the most cans of Pepsi as possible. But sometimes, the quality of audience matters. Buzzlogic has done a good job so far, and has lots of fertile ground to till.
Buzzlogic launched last spring, with 25 customers testing the original “alpha” test product. Some 80 customers then began using its “beta” test product, half of those paying. It has since increased the number of beta users to 164. It has 20 employees. It charges $100 a month per conversation tracked. An entry level package of $12,000 a year, therefore, gives you 10 conversations (in the case of this American Idol Contest analysis example, it would all be part of one conversation, and that includes edits to terms, for example, if you wanted to add a date, and analyze the terms “American Idol 2007″.) The annual subscription gives marketers the ability to constantly monitor the influential bloggers in subject areas they care about.
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9 Comments
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Sameer said:
I love it. The price point seems reasonable. 12K for a corporate marketing department to see how the blogosphere is reacting to, say its earnings announcement or a PR crisis is justifiable.
Well done, Sameer
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Skeptic said:
Matt, have you actually tried the product?
I had a demo with these guys a few months ago and the first unscripted keyword I entered returned W3C page as a top “blog”, while the real important coverage was missed.
The idea of measuring influence simply by these links is suspect at best. Much of real influence spread through offline mechanisms which cannot be measured by link counts.
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ted said:
I would rather spend 48k a year on a human being who can synthesize the data using freely available tools. In fact, that’s what I am doing.
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Matt Marshall said:
Skeptic,
Well, I was limited to the demo that they gave. They did let me take them to and fro within the American Idol example, however, no, I didn’t have freedom of my own searches. Good point, and I’ve made the clear in the update. My point at the end was meant to suggest this isn’t shouldn’t be about the numbers of eyeballs, and that Buzzlogic needs to go further. I do believe that they’ve made a first stab at this, and its a good effort — but much, much more rich, fertile ground yet to till.
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Todd Parsons said:
Matt, thanks for your thoughtful review of our service–we’re happy to give you a closer look. And while we’re off to a good start, I do agree there is plenty of fertile ground to be tilled. Hopefully, you’ll be willing to share our progress over the coming months.
Sameer, your experience in the space speaks for itself. I appreciate your acknowledgement of the value we’re delivering for a very low price.
Skeptic, thanks for taking the time to share your opinion. We’ve made immense progress building our index and evolving our application since beta, and I hope you’ll give us a second look. Drop me an email if you’re interested.
Finally, I’m sure some folks share your view Ted. But it should be made clear that BuzzLogic is focused on more than driving visibility into social media. Our customers are driving us to continue developing features that enable them to engage and build relationships with the blogging community, and visibilty is simply the foundation for doing that.
Todd Parsons
Chief Product Officer -
Rohit Verma said:
I am sure, this is one of the pioneering concepts for PR in the new era of bursting communications. In my view if we tried or promoted the concept to influence blogs, then surely the analysis will get corrupted as data points woud have been plugged. SO may be, we should leave aside influencing the bloggers, let this be a sanctury for thoughts and not a induced breeding ground.
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David Moring said:
We have done a lot of work in the area of textual analysis, ontologies, scale free networks, and other “bursting” and “tipping point” technologies. The first thing that we have learned is that nothing replaces human experience and intuition. In fact there are now books discussion how data mining is often incorrectly used to replace intuition, with expensive results.
That said, tools such as this, provide a way for a human being to have a broader/better/objective view of the data, and can help focus the intuition.
Given the increasing speed of communication, the non-linearity of how many people it impacts, the pervasiveness of Internet technology–this is an important field that should be watched for innovation and new ideas. Those that get it right, will set their clients on exponential growth paths such as hush puppies, facebook, you tube… -
Whatever-ishere said:
thanks for the GREAT post! Very useful…
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lost life insurance policy said:
perfect site !!!!!!!! Perfect piece of work fellows !!!!!!!
