BuzzLogic Platform Maps Top Online Influencers

BuzzLogic has launched a service to track conversations in the media and blogsophere, with an emphasis on discovering and mapping the top influencers in social media. The San Francisco-based company introduced the platform, which targets small as well as big businesses, at the DEMO Conference today.

“A lot of people are perplexed by social media. It’s just a confusing tangle,” Chief Marketing Officer Bob Schettino told ClickZ. “We are providing our customers tools that will allow them to actually manage social media as a channel… Rather than look at thousands or tens of thousands of blogs, we say here are the 10 or 20 most influential [individuals].”

The Web-based application joins other “listening” platforms now offered by companies like Cymfony, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Waggener Edstrom and Umbria. BuzzLogic hopes to differentiate itself from those offerings by focusing on identifying the top handful of influencers — not merely the most popular, in terms of traffic or inbound links — within customer-specified “conversations.”

The company uses four metrics to assign influence to a blog or media outlet: a site’s contextual relevance to a customer’s specified area of concern, frequency of content publication on such topics, number of inbound links, and traffic. Its tools then visually map top influencers in relation to the conversations they sway, and in turn, the media sources that influence them.

Reports are offered in real time, helping PR and marketing types make accurate crisis management and outreach decisions on the fly. Such immediacy is important, explained Schettino, because “Influence is dynamic. It waxes and wanes.”

The product comes with a starting price tag of $500 a month for basic mapping and reporting functions. Customers with more expansive monitoring requirements can scale up from there. “It’s attractive pricing for people who want to launch in the blogosphere,” Schettino said. “We are going to be very disruptive in this market.”

Beta testers of the service have included PC maker Lenovo and Waggener Edstrom.