Can you hear me now? – December 19, 2007

So you decided to write a “blog”. Welcome to the club! What’s that? You want to find out whether or not people are reading it? Beyond layering in some Google Analytic html code, or checking out Technorati to see your authority level, there are other ways to figure out how much of an influence you have (or don’t) in the blogosphere. Marketers can also use the tool to check out if people are talking about their products or brands.

I beta-tested this really interesting conversation monitoring product from a company called BuzzLogic. In theory, it allows a user to enter a set of key terms into a search query box, at which point the product will then crawl the web and identify key blogs and conversations relevant to the search query. It measures things like frequency, relevancy, level of influence, key influencers, etc. It also creates a map of how the blogs link together, and gives them a rating of what ones are most important. In their own words, BuzzLogic says it can, “Surface the influencers leading conversations that matter and target your messages to them and their audiences for the highest return.”

I tried it out, and found it to be somewhat useful. It requires a high level of involvement, and I wasn’t 100% positive that the algorithms they used to identify key influencers were right. In the end I’d rather have this tool than not.

If you don’t have any money to subscribe to a service like BuzzLogic and you’re interested in trying a beta-test of a social monitoring technology, try checking out Scout Labs. It’s got a demo you can watch that shows you what its technologies can accomplish. Sign up to test their product and see what happens.