VentureBeat

Buzzlogic, the San Francisco company that tries to help marketers and others gauge which blogs are the most influential for specific topics, has raised an extra $2.5 million in financing to help it promote its new advertising product.

The company launched its blog analysis product in May (our coverage), but earlier this month additionally launched a way to target advertising against those influential blogs. You type in a topic into Buzzlogic’s dashboard, and it provides you a list of the most influential blogs around certain products or product types.

The company has several competitors in the area of tracking of social media. There’s a grid below shows competitors and how they differ. Note the matrix is supplied by Collective Intellect, of Colorado, and so it is somewhat biased toward that company. Buzzlogic would disagree, for example, with the grid’s suggestion that it doesn’t offer real-time analysis. However, we provide it so can you get a feel for the landscape. Collective Intellect’s product, called Media Intellect, only recently launched, and is being used by 70 hedge funds. Radian6 is another player we’ve covered.

Buzzlogic has previously raised $11 million.

Investors so far include Adams Capital Management, Transcosmos and Ackerley Partners.

BuzzLogic, the San Francisco company that helps you find out which blogs are influential, has raised $9.6 million in a first round of venture capital.

It was led by Adams Capital Management, Ackerley Partners and Transcosmos Investments & Business Development.

We wrote about BuzzLogic when it launched in September after raising a seed round of $1.5 million.

The company seeks to define which blogs are shaping conversations online. It uses four criteria to measure a blog:
•overall traffic and number of inbound links
•contextual relevance to a customer’s specified area of concern, such as key words.
•frequency of content publication on such topics
•the traffic it sends back to the marketer

Robert Schettino, the company’s chief marketing officer, said the company has signed up 80 customers for its testing phase, with roughly half of them paying (the basic fee is $500/month).