The modern Net-savvy marketing consultant advises businesses of all sizes to track what blogs have to say about a brand. BuzzLogic CTO Todd Parsons suggests his firm as a way to seine the blogosphere for those nuggets of gold.
BuzzLogic Ready To Mint Influence Currency
It may be enough for a one-person shop to subscribe to alerts from Google Blogsearch, Technorati, and BlogPulse to track their mentions online. On an enterprise level, the task of keeping up with higher levels of chatter becomes far greater than what one-person can do part time.
Those conversations hold too much importance, both financially and intangibly, to treat as watercooler talk to be ignored. Disdaining the online discussions allows them to build steam.
Some conversations, and the bloggers who influence them, merit greater attention than most. BuzzLogic has a way to tell who the influencers are, and just how far they reach.
Parsons called this influence the real currency in social media. Responding to this from a business perspective means finding the people whose opinions carry the most sway, and targeting them for feedback.
I’m going to caution bloggers here that for a starting point of $12,000, a BuzzLogic client who falls under a blog’s niche of coverage will be subject to a careful and relentless algorithmic scrutinizer. You may or may not be bothered by this; comments, naturally, are welcome below the article.
As Parsons showed in a demonstration of BuzzLogic, the product looks for trust relationships. Spam blogs don’t enter the equations when calculating the Conversation Index, a way of seeing who’s talking and who’s listening.
Parsons said the product derives influence from what BuzzLogic finds across both blogs and the mainstream media. BuzzLogic can show who influences the conversation, and when they began to influence it.
The audience falls into the measurements as well. BuzzLogic tries to determine the quality of the audience by looking at the basic popularity of the site, then at the relevance of linkers to it and how often they link to it.
All of this information displays on a map inside the BuzzLogic console. The map shows upstream and downstream influence as bloggers post, connect, and connect again.
BuzzLogic tracks the rise and fall of influencers over time, through a watchlist a user can create. Also, users can drill down to specific posts, and assign the tone of the post a rating from a dropdown menu..
That dashboard shows a workspace with campaign management tools, where the business can monitor conversations based around specific marketing efforts. Parsons showed a couple of CRM-like components, where marketing and PR types can create a history of their interactions with a given influencer and share those with other users on the system.
There is a lot going on in BuzzLogic, as its not only picks up people joining the conversation, but has some future planning ability too. Through its gathering of influence information, BuzzLogic can be used to build a channel ahead of time.
With this, a marketer will have an idea of who the influencers will be as far as likely commenters on a new campaign. Parsons said BuzzLogic will soon have an ad targeting piece, which will have a use for businesses to identify potential destinations for marketing efforts.
Some of BuzzLogic’s customers already use the product in this way, Parson said. Many use it just to get a better picture of the landscape of influencing voices, and engage with them in a timely fashion before something can become a PR nightmare.
We expect more businesses will look to BuzzLogic or other solutions as they seek ways to proactively manage, or at least try to manage, the independent voices online. Bloggers who see themselves rapidly targeted by public relations types after writing a post may have done more than show up in a keyword alert.
They may have made it onto BuzzLogic’s map.
