Money Magazine Online had an interesting article today, "Policing The Online Buzz".
In short, an innovative and affordable buzz tracking tool about to be launched by Buzzlogic. According to their site...
Influence moves markets. It's a basic tenet of marketing. But until now, it's been impossible to understand influence -- and who wields it -- within specific conversations taking place in social media.
BuzzLogic changes this dynamic by uniquely defining and measuring influence in social media, and by surfacing the key influencers who are shaping and defining markets, issues and reputations.
....which all sounds good until things go horribly, horribly bad.
Buzz tracking is, understandably, a growing industry as companies are fast finding out that any press is not necessarily good press. A company can quickly get over their penchant and longing for blog mentions and blog links when they discover a mouse more toxic than a hantivirus carrier.
Just ask Dell, who found themselves on the downside of the Dell Hell episode. (ED NOTE: Some things don't always need a link to them. For the curious, Yahoo "dell hell", or use another search engine to do much the same.)
Buzz tracking can be an arduous endeavour and for larger companies, is generally the considerably more costly domain of companies like Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Companies like Attentio are also in the space.
But what's really cool about BuzzLogic, and certainly makes it worthy of the buzz is that it connects the dots, putting it into context and allowing companies to be proactive about with bad news.
And that's a good thing. A very good thing indeed.
Read the article.
And have a good one.
~ The (SEP) Guy