A lot of criticism was flung at Forbes’ Daniel Lyons after he characterized the blogosphere “an online lynch mob” that swarms the object of their blog-rage, whether the information is accurate or not. Lyons created his own self-fulfilling prophecy and was cyber-lynched by the same collection of pundits he had accused.
Point made, Mr. Lyons, the blogosphere can be a nasty place, especially if you’re in the business of managing a public image. The phenomenon has set off a competitive market for online reputation management-a ring in which Feedster and Biz360 were quick to throw their hats.
On Monday the two companies announced a partnership to provide marketing and communications professionals with a service that gleans intelligence from the increasing volume of blog and wiki content discussing companies, products, competitors and trends. BlogView, an expansion of Biz360’s Market360, automates sentiment ratings and surfaces topics and influencers related to the aforementioned categories.
Biz360’s Senior Manager of Market Strategy, Brian Glover, refrained from making mention of previous public image metrics providers like Intelliseek and IBM’s Public Image Monitoring Solution. But Glover says the service is unique because of a pending patent technology, with the technological aid of Feedster refreshing 18 million feeds a day, that “learns” a client’s understanding of language nuances.
“Our biggest differentiators are our Point-of-View Sentiment and Auto Discovery technologies, which allow us to deliver far deeper and relevant intelligence than other services,” said Glover.
“We’re the only company that has automated sentiment ratings toward specific companies, products and issues you’re tracking. Also, Point-of-View Sentiment is a machine-learning technology that “learns” a client’s style of rating–what’s positive to one client may be negative to another, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to rating sentiment.”
Auto Discovery surfaces buzz phrases, influencers and brand associations related to the topic. For example, marketers can answer questions like “what’s the buzz around the latest iPod?” or “who are the influencers driving discussion of Avian Flu?”
This contextual analysis technology is fed by active blog feeds provided by Feedster for real time monitoring. The blogosphere, like a house of mirrors, makes it difficult to identify reality-a problem that Feedster president Chris Redlitz says this partnership aims to solve.
“The Blogosphere is noisy and hard to track since for every legitimate blog there are dozens more that are essentially fake. Feedster has an advanced ability to monitor everything in the blog world and provide Biz360 postings that are meaningful and actionable,” said Retlitz.
BlogView is available now as part of Market360, which supports RSS, or as a standalone service. The capabilities will also be available through LexisNexis MarketImpact and StrategyOne’s MediaMind.
