Like a bag of Oreos and a quart of Hawaiian Punch, there were topics in 2007 that bloggers couldn’t help from overindulging in during the year.

Blog tracking application maker BuzzLogic said bloggers couldn’t get enough of hotel heiress and weeping jailbird Hilton this year. Obsessing over Hilton easily outpaced postings about mother of the year candidate Britney Spears, and the blossoming train wrecks of the careers of Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse.

Michael Vick and his dogfighting case brought out a lot of sports blog commentary. The flashy star’s 23-month federal sentence today capped off several months of speculation in and out of the blogosphere.

The Red Sox have a World Series crown, but people couldn’t stop blogging about the Yankees when it came to teams being talked about in the most influential blogs. Barry Bonds and Tom Brady received a lot of attention for very different reasons.

Politics may be the fuel that fires the blogosphere, even more than technology due to the way it appeals across social and economic bounds. President Bush and Republican laywer-shooing Vice President Dick Cheney weren’t just the two most talked about men in politics, but in blogs as a whole, according to BuzzLogic.

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“Conversation targeting builds on behavioral targeting, without privacy issues,” he told WebProNews.

Advertising inserted with Buzzlogic’s new feature lets the advertisers focus on a specific site or group of social media sites and blogs. The manager quickly creates an ad group with Google’s AdWords, and drops it into the sites that carry AdSense.

The advertiser can drill down below the influencer sites to see how the conversation flows back and forth, and target those inlinkers from the Buzzlogic interface.

During the private beta test of Conversation Targeting, Parsons said participants have seen their conversions double thanks to the new feature. That should be an effective pitch to make to potential clients.

We notice with Buzzlogic how the product performs a straightforward task – putting ads directly into the places where a receptive audience will see them. Some of the bigger successes seen on the modern Internet follow a simple model, like Google with text ads or Delicious with bookmarking. Buzzlogic is in good company.

To leverage the BuzzLogic Ad Targeting feature, advertisers create BuzzLogic conversation queries (similar to key word searches) to discover the opinion leaders who are driving online conversations on virtually any topic, as well as the community of sites listening to or participating in a particular discussion. Once influential sites are identified, advertisers develop text or display ads directly from the BuzzLogic dashboard, then customize a list of influencers for site-level campaign targeting.

BuzzLogic will allow advertisers to change their advertising based upon who’s influencing the conversation at the time. “Influence is topic-specific and dynamic – it changes over time,” said Rob Crumpler, president and CEO of BuzzLogic. “For the first time, BuzzLogic Ad Targeting is making it possible for advertisers to follow influential conversations as they move across the web, and target ads in the exact places where like-minded consumers are gathering to exchange ideas and opinions.”

Here’s how it looks:

The company claims the new service increases conversion rates–which makes sense if the ads are targeted to hot conversations. That said, it will be interesting to see which company is the first to stumble. While BuzzLogic’s ads will help you to better target your ads to match the conversations, I’m sure it won’t be long before a brand-under-fire tries to use the service to participate in the conversation. If your business is being criticized, it could be tempting to simply post some ads instead of responding to the blogger’s concerns. In addition, I wonder if bloggers will feel pressure from their readers–such as happened with FM Publishing’s attempt to mix conversations with advertising.

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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.

What BuzzLogic’s CMO, Robert Schettino has to say: “We address a clear marketing need: how to understand and engage with social media such as blogs. We believe that understanding who is influential, and how they are wielding that influence, will help marketers better focus their listening, and better direct their influencer-oriented marketing initiatives. They can use this information to better manage their brands, reputations, products and customer relationships.”

How does BuzzLogic do it? BuzzLogic uniquely calculates and surfaces influence in social media by analyzing relationships – who connects to whom, about what and when, and who is listening. Specifically this means that their algorithms look at the relevance of blog posts within a social media conversation; determine the occurrence of these messages over time; analyze the linking attention to and from relevant content; and measure the popularity of the posting site and all its inbound linking sites. They will soon add the ability to define the traffic these blogs sites send back to the marketers’ site. This will probably be implemented through page tagging similarly done with Web Analytics Solutions.

I know that this tools can surely help our B2B clients who are heavily focused in comparing how well they are doing against their competitors (in terms of Brand exposure). I was able to get a demo today and was quite impressed with BuzzLogic’s interface, specefically the speed of reporting and ease of usability. Here are some screenshots from our demo using “Kobe Bryant” as our focus keyword:

The image below (also from the BuzzLogic application) is a thumbnail of the actual post that was highlighted in the image below. This image also includes a snapshot of key data about this particular post – the influence rank within this specific conversation; its popularity, relevance and reach.

The image below is a summary list, produced within the BuzzLogic application, of the most influential posts on a specific topic at a specific moment.

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Manoj has been working in the search engine marketing industry since 2002. He started out as a software developer but now provides in-depth web site analysis using web analytics.

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Manoj is also the author of Web Analytics World. Web Analytics is an essential component in developing a successful
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None of the existing tools for performing these tasks has proven adequate to the challenge of social media like blogs which are host to millions of conversations that are constantly being updated around the clock. Blog search engines can tell you who is popular, but not who is influential. Traditional brand monitoring and analysis services can tell you what a sample of bloggers was thinking a few weeks ago, but that’s ancient history in the blogosphere.

BuzzLogic is a start-up with a solution. Founded by internet veteran Mitch Ratcliffe and Todd Parsons and introduced at demoFALL, BuzzLogic is a hot new on-demand web service that allows marketers to monitor, map, measure and engage conversations in social media in nearly real-time. (The company is now in a second round of private beta.)

BuzzLogic identifies 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. In its model, an “influencer” is a “post or publisher generating a significant volume of relevant inbound links and comments about a particular topic or conversation, within a specific timeframe.”

The value is that marketing and communications pros can use these insights to understand influence and who has it, to manage their brands, reputations, products and customer relationships-and to do so while the conversation is still ongoing.

“Social media may soon rival mainstream media in impact, yet there’s been no meaningful way to understand or untangle it,” said Rob Crumpler, BuzzLogic CEO, in a press release. “Influence is the most meaningful way to understand social media. Through the lens of influence, social media is transformed from chaotic tangle to manageable channel.”

BuzzLogic is hardly alone in seeking to build a business around measuring social media influence; Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Cymphony and several other companies are also in the game. This is a case where the company whose algorithms produce the most finely-tuned, accurate and current information stands to emerge as the big winner among corporate communicators, PR firms, customer service and market researchers and other areas where discerning the “voice of the customer” is essential.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, and its “disruptive” price of $500 per month to track 20 conversations (queries), 25 influencers deep, I like BuzzLogic’s chances of being that winner.

If markets really are conversations, BuzzLogic may just have come up with the ultimate eavesdropping device.

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Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

http://www.enterpriseweb2.com

None of the existing tools for performing these tasks has proven adequate to the challenge of social media like blogs which are host to millions of conversations that are constantly being updated around the clock. Blog search engines can tell you who is popular, but not who is influential. Traditional brand monitoring and analysis services can tell you what a sample of bloggers was thinking a few weeks ago, but that’s ancient history in the blogosphere.

BuzzLogic is a start-up with a solution. Founded by internet veteran Mitch Ratcliffe and Todd Parsons and introduced at demoFALL, BuzzLogic is a hot new on-demand web service that allows marketers to monitor, map, measure and engage conversations in social media in nearly real-time. (The company is now in a second round of private beta.)

BuzzLogic identifies 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. In its model, an “influencer” is a “post or publisher generating a significant volume of relevant inbound links and comments about a particular topic or conversation, within a specific timeframe.”

The value is that marketing and communications pros can use these insights to understand influence and who has it, to manage their brands, reputations, products and customer relationships-and to do so while the conversation is still ongoing.

“Social media may soon rival mainstream media in impact, yet there’s been no meaningful way to understand or untangle it,” said Rob Crumpler, BuzzLogic CEO, in a press release. “Influence is the most meaningful way to understand social media. Through the lens of influence, social media is transformed from chaotic tangle to manageable channel.”

BuzzLogic is hardly alone in seeking to build a business around measuring social media influence; Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Cymphony and several other companies are also in the game. This is a case where the company whose algorithms produce the most finely-tuned, accurate and current information stands to emerge as the big winner among corporate communicators, PR firms, customer service and market researchers and other areas where discerning the “voice of the customer” is essential.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, and its “disruptive” price of $500 per month to track 20 conversations (queries), 25 influencers deep, I like BuzzLogic’s chances of being that winner.

If markets really are conversations, BuzzLogic may just have come up with the ultimate eavesdropping device.

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Bookmark WebProNews:

Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

http://www.enterpriseweb2.com

I usually refuse to tell them, because it is about me and my tools and my skill set. It is not about making the industry better, but about pushing myself forward as the numero uno dude.

Oh, wait, that is not how I work. Damn. Well, if it was, I would totally beat down people. Totally.

Okay, really, I work with the interns here and try to teach them the best tools that I have found on monitoring the blogosphere. Why? So they have the skills here, so I can send them work to begin, and then when they go off to their career, they will be able to use some of the tools I taught them here, and then pass on the knowledge to other PR people. It’s all about learning.

So, what do I use to find appropriate blogs? Easy: Blogpulse, Technorati, PubSub. Those three are great free tools to monitor and find information on blogs. Yes, they are not perfect, but they have been perfectly good tools to do what I need to do when finding and tracking and monitoring – they get the job done, for free.

And, there are other tools that I love to use, such as Biz360 and Buzzlogic. I got a demo of Buzzlogic, and think it is a great tool for PR and marketing folks to follow the conversation thread in blogs.

Because, that is what it is about – the conversation. The conversation can start anywhere – a bike messenger board, a low-readership blog, in the real world – and it can steamroll. That is the whole point with new media – that it is the conversation that starts, and can take a full whole new life on other blogs with trackbacks, which are easily monitored.

But, that is just half the conversation. The deeper conversations are taking place in comments, and beyond the ego-fulfillment to see if someone has responded to your comment, you want to be able to monitor comments merely to see what people are saying and because now too much happens within comments. And not much works well there so far.

So last night, I met up with Assaf Arkin who founded Co.mments. We had a long discussion on everything Web 2.0, dotcom boom and bust, surviving the bubble (and surviving the next bubble burst), and Co.mments.

And that is the interesting part. He tracks the conversations through the comments submitted through his service. Instead of looking at the full ginormous blogosphere, he is able to look at the conversations that his users are finding important. Think about that: he’s getting a magnifying glass view of the blogosphere, through the comments.

But beyond ego-tracking, the tool is a necessary tool for PR people. It’s in my bag of tricks, because it is not just enough to track blogs, but you need to track conversations. Well, baby steps for PR firms and clients – first let us at least track the conversation. Then we will get to the next step on tracking the conversations within the conversations.

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.