Buzzlogic aims to untangle "Social Media"
By Tom Foremski - September 25, 2006
Buzzlogic introduces on-demand software service to help companies identify key online influencers.
From Buzzlogic:
. . . BuzzLogic calculates and surfaces the influencers who are shaping and driving specific conversations in social media with algorithms that analyze relationships, such as who connects to whom, about what is happening and who is listening.
. . . A key feature of the service is the ability to draw social maps of influencers in a conversation, essentially a critical path of the relationships between key influencers.
BuzzLogic also enables marketers to engage with key influencers through the service, and to monitor and track the results of their actions.
SVW take: It is an interesting service to find influential bloggers and others. However, shouldn't every company already know who is influential in their space?
I'd be interested to find out if mainstream media journalists are as influential as PR companies think they are. Quite often a lot of work goes into influencing a publication such as BusinessWeek to write about a company or product, yet that effort can produce small returns in terms of influence and sales. Yet some journalist bloggers can weave a much more influential network.
Once the key influencers are identified what is the course of action? To smother them with love and presents?
In another context, a repressive government could use this technology to smother dissidents . . .
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Please see SVW: The metrics of influence - The mania for measuring and identifying top bloggers
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Comments (3)
I have been advising BuzzLogic since July of last year after speaking with Mitch Ratcliffe at Gnomedex about conversational intelligence. You make some excellent points here - particularly about potential big brother like usage - but to combine your insights, shouldn't those governments already know who those influentials are?
Well the conversation web is a big place and while most organizations do they they know who are the most influential, the don't really KNOW for sure. This form of metrics introduces some interesting possibilities for discovering the truly influential around specific topics as opposed to broad audience numbers.
To be clear - the real point here is not to manipulate markets, but to ENGAGE with people in conversations. The typical corporation only has so much time and resources to invest in building relationships with the public, so they need to focus that where they can get the broadest amount of reach for their time invested. As we have been talking about, participation is the real key to benefitting from social media.
Or perhaps more organizations will start thinking like David Churbuck from Lenovo who has used BuzzLogic to reach out to customers with problems, providing proactive customer support. From my perspective, that is what I have been waiting for for over 7 years...
Posted: September 27, 2006 2:18 PM
Who are those ‘influential’s, yes the press should be- but if they are not doing the job, why not true citizen journos ? I also think that the ‘influential’ is still based on classic in-house media perspectives, PR people to press people. Why, should a story in the FT, on a tech story, be better than a trade-media story--often written by a more experienced journo, three days before the FT picks it up! Google stats, based on actual traffic to a given story showing for everyone to see/access may not be something in the pipeline but it would sure change the media dynamics?
Which story appealed the most may be the way forward. If it’s a citizen journo piece, then so be it?
Posted: September 29, 2006 4:48 PM
Mark: It is interesting that there is a lot of focus on who is influential but most of the focus is on the blogosphere. Yet mainstream media is incredibly influential. The problem lies in the way influence is measured. Services such as Technorati and others, try to assess influence by counting numbers of links to a post. If you don't have a permalink, you don't get links and you don't get counted. Many mainstream media sites don't use permalinks.
Also, influence is exercised in much more subtle, and far less overt ways. We've all had that experience of having our ideas/opinions come back to us through other people and they cannot remember the source. That's the most effective influence. Can anyone track that with algorithms and link-counting? I don't think so.
Posted: October 1, 2006 4:53 PM