VentureBeat

updated
Visible Technologies, one of the more prominent companies that helps people and companies track their online identities, has raised $12 million in financing.

Like competitors Buzzlogic, Radian6 and others, Seattle-based Visible Technologies has developed software that tries to find mentions of clients on web sites.

Its Truview product analyzes search engine results on clients, tries to determine if the mentions are positive or negative, then sends a report to the client and tries to connect them directly to the site where the mention was made. Its TruCast product analyzes conversations on blogs, forums and other community sites.

Visible Technologies shows trends in how a company’s brand is being received over time, who the influential people are who are talking about the company, and what parts of the web are giving the company the most attention.

Public relations on the web is a tricky business: The near-limitless amount of information freely available means more things can always be said about a company than a company can realistically respond to, even with such tracking technology. When companies do respond, they risk sounding fake. A string of uniformly bland and positive statements about themselves sounds like PR spin to most people, not independent opinions.

Buzzlogic (our coverage) provides rival products to help clients measure overall traffic to a source site, that site’s number of inbound links and relevance to a client. It also checks for how frequently a site publishes on the topic and how much traffic it sends to the client.

Radian 6 (our coverage) tracks information on sites by analyzing incoming RSS feeds.

The funding was led by Ignition Partners. Visible Technologies previously raised $3.5 million from WPP Group, an advertising conglomerate.

Update: The company is now worth about $30 million, according to some reports.

The chaos of content that is Web 2.0 has made it increasingly difficult for marketers and public relations people to control the messages circulating about the companies and products they represent, so it was perhaps inevitable that start-ups would emerge to help these people try to restore order.

Last week, we reported that one such start-up, New Brunswick, Canada-based Radian6, had raised $4 million dollars in seed funding from BCE Captial, Brightspark Ventures and BDC Venture Captital. Today, we take a closer look at the company.

Radian6 deploys a crawler that tracks information delivered by RSS. It pulls in the vast amounts of publicly available data accumulating in blogs, social networks, forums, and video and photo sharing sites and enables its customers to keep track of it in real time.

See screenshot below of how Radian6 presents information about the Presidential candidates.

In the demo we saw, Radian6 demonstrated the viral effects of the public relations crisis that befell AOL when a random blogger named Vincent Ferrari tried to cancel his AOL account. Ferrari recorded the fierce resistance he encountered while doing so, and posted the recording on his blog. Soon after, this recording exploded through the blogosphere. Ferrari ended up on NBC Today, and the video of that interview became a smash on YouTube.

With a simple Boolean query “AOL AND Customer service,” Radian6 brought up a “topic cloud” that, like a tag cloud, presented the recurring terms surrounding the query. Some of the largest terms were “Vincent Ferrari,” “NBC Today,” “Recorded Call,” and “Angry.” These terms flashed whenever the system encountered a new data point relevant to the term.

Through Radian6’s dashboard, a user can do on-the-fly analysis, creating, in our example, graphs comparing the number of posts that mention Vincent Ferrari with the number of posts that mention AOL’s customer service, making it easy to see how much damage Vincent Ferrari’s recording had done last month, last week, and today.

Users can also get real-time data about how a piece of viral information is catching on. They can, for example, see the how many people have commented on a post, how many people have looked at these comments, how many unique commentators there have been, and, finally, how many times these unique commentators have come back to respond.

This real-time system is designed to help public relations managers keep immediate tabs on crises.

Radian6’s approach, with its focus on immediate updates and use of publicly available information, differs from its main competitors, Buzzlogic and Visible Technologies.

The first, which we covered here, focuses on the blogosphere and determines which bloggers and blog posts have the most influence on the way a message spreads.

The second, like Radian6, looks across blogs, opinion sites, and social networks, but instead of using a general RSS-based crawler that works in real-time, builds custom crawlers for individual clients.

Visible Technologies’ approach doesn’t give instantaneous updates, but does offer text analysis that determines the tone (positive, negative, or neutral) of the posts it crawls. Also, both Buzzlogic and Visible Technologies allow their clients to use one dashboard to respond to any conversation happening across the web, a feature that Radian6’s technology does not offer.

The common thread linking these companies is a belief that chaos of user-generated media is susceptible to rational analysis, the kind that marketers and PR companies love. The idea is that wilderness of Web 2.0 can perhaps be tamed.

Radian6’s launch is slated for this Fall. We’ll keep you posted.