BuzzGain, a new service that helps users manage their relationships and keep tabs on the public perception of their products, has launched in public beta. The service is meant to help small and medium sized companies analyze how their products are being discussed across the web and through social channels like Twitter, and can identify how online “influencers” are interacting. It also helps track thousands of news outlets and hundreds of blogs in an effort to help users understand what each outlet covers, so they don’t reach out repeatedly to writers who have no interest in their product pitches (many bad PR agencies just blast releases to every Email address they have).
The service is broken into three tabs: Listen, Learn, and Analyze, each of which is fairly self explanatory. The Listen tab focuses primarily on searching for keywords that you’ve designated that you’d like to monitor (for example, you could keep a search out for a recently-released product model to see if you had any complaints). The Learn tab offers a listing of news sites, blogs, and Twitter users that have featured content relating to your campaign’s keywords. And the Analyze tab offers charts and graphs depicting how hot your search terms are on the web using technology developed with Senti-Metrics. Most of these searches are automated, but BuzzGain also employs an editorial team to ensure that entries in its database are relevant.
Other functions include the ability to monitor blogs for new authors, or track which writers have been focusing on a certain topic (you can also apparently tell which bloggers tend to write negative posts).
While many of the features BuzzGain offers could probably be accomplished with other services (for example, you could use Google Blog Search to search for new posts written by a certain author), BuzzGain brings them all into a single interface that is much easier to manage. For the most part the service is easy to navigate, though it has a definite learning curve (you’ll want to take advantage of the 30-day trial). The service will be temporarily free for its public beta, and will later change over to a monthly subscription that ranges from $99-$999 a month depending on how many users are signed up under the company’s account.
Disclosure: BuzzGain co-founder Brian Solis has written a few guest posts for us.
It’s a good idea, but interface needs a lot of work to make it more intuitive.
But kudos for at least having a business model!
MightyBrand.com is much more intuitive.
@smartbabesaresexy – we’ll work on making it better, love your suggestion, please email me at mukund [at] buzzgain . com
thanks.
Wow, that’s great customer response!
I think getting any good interface design team to go over it once will make a big difference. If you need some contacts in India that can do it for a reasonable price, contact me through my blog, and I’ll try to get you in touch with some folks.
India has some really great designers these days.
Hi Smartbabesaresexy,
I would love some contacts in India… I am planning a very funky website/ app that needs good coders.
And having trouble finding ones that are smart and creative problem solvers.
My partner is a designer, we need coders that understand the importance of getting the interface right.
would love to hear from you on Twitter
Sarah
Great project! Just signed up, and it is returning great results on the keywords I’m searching.
FYI I’ve tried startpr.com which is pretty much doing the same thing, the interface is a bit nicer though!
Ilan, glad you like startpr, its going to get better in the next few weeks.
it makes sense lots of companies pop up in this space. its hard to manage and more and more important to keep on top of this realm.
DIY rep management must be the new black. I just saw another very similar service at http://www.buzzding.com/
It appears that they are also in beta but the screenshots look pretty nice.
Looks like a cool product. Yet another way to lower the cost of a startup and allow you to bootstrap a little longer. Definitely going to give it a try in the near future.
schoolshift.com
dankalmar.com
twitter.com/dankalmar
Sounds pretty cool to me
Kudos to Mukund for bringing such a useful service to fruition
Oh great, just what we need, another an online noise monitor. Buzz is the problem at the moment and more buzz is not the solution
This seems like an interesting idea, but please do not call it Do-It-Yourself-PR. True public relations is about real relationships with journalists and providing influences with the information and sources they want, when they need it.
This is more about social media brand management and buzz marketing.
Don’t you think you should mention that Brian Solis, a TechCrunch contributing writer, is the co-founder? It’s called being transparent when you write about your friends.
I think he’s only written a few posts as a guest author but I’ll add a note.
More like about 18 of them, so I think it would be good journalism to do so. Thanks for responding so quickly though.
i like it, but $100 is too much IMO.
@clarkmatt – sure. that positioning makes sense. the reason we chose DIY PR is because relationships dont have to built for you by others.
But you’re right. We’ll keep making positioning adjustments. thanks
@patrick – maybe we should have named it Toomuchbuzz
buzzlogic has been doing this for years – but mostly targeted at large PR firms that can track buzz for clients. They’ve also woven it into an SEM management tool. Think keyword research and targeting the right places within the AdSense network (where the influencers are). This kind of seems like buzzlogic lite.
I think the fundamental difference is that people (influencers) are at the heart of our system and Conversations (Buzz) are the heart of BuzzLogic and others. That said they have been around much longer no doubt and are trying to focus on blog advertising now I believe. Am I right?
This service sure has a lot of bugs for a free preview period aimed at snagging paying customers.
Signup is awkward, and my dashboard shows a news feed full of pages from the “Douglas Dispatch” that relate to none of my custom key words. Multiple-word tags seem to confuse it, quotes don’t help, and I can’t filter out my own blogs from the results.
What does this do that a bit of simple setup won’t allow you to do for yourself, for free? Daily twitter search, a google alert or two, and Google Blog Search and you seem to basically have this service for free, without the bugs.
To be fair, I’ll add that I had better check back in with this service next week to see how they display and let you dig into accumulated data. Not enough now to judge that aspect of the service.
Jeremiah
You hit a lot of our pain points. We were going to detail that in a bug report, so you’re comment just makes that timeline now.
I do appreciate you taking the time though, so we’ll fix those issues and email you for more feedback.
thanks.
If I may ask, how is your service different from PRWeb and the likes?
Sarah
http://www.StartupBuzz.com
I think this is great concept and a nice step to try and bring a dashboard for marketers because this is definitely a problem that I would like to see solved. I understand it’s preview but it’s not much better than existing current free solutions. For one of my clients, I have created a listening dashboard using a start page service to pull in conversations across blogs, twitter, youtube, delicious, flickr, etc. In addition to listening, I have provided quick links to all their profiles, all their metrics like TubeMogul, Google Analytics, etc.
I am looking forward to see how the service improves and I will definitely keep on eye on it and see if it’s worth using/recommending once it’s launched.
I’m going to be the Devil’s Advocate here..
Are there examples of companies that have used your service? No where on the site could I find mention of ad partners that you work with, blogs or discussion groups that you listen to, or how you go about listening to blogs, twitter feeds, and the general noise of the internet (or do you filter it for users based on their PR keywords?). An example interface would be nice to see before I sign up. I’m not even sure what the differences between what I would get for the monthly rates..Are the services the same? Are you more catering to your 1000/month clients?
From the Buzzgain Overview, there is no compelling reason for me to choose Buzzgain, over a more established solution for PR management. That is, as a small business, I can aggregate all the information you are doing (it seems) on my own (google search blogs and analytics, adsense, quantcast, alexa, compete, etc), and keep the $1200/year. For a small business starting out, I would prefer to have tailored information and do my business that way, which keeps me personally in tune with what my customers want.
Tell me if I’m off base here.
what a nice discussion this is , you have 2 kinds of people posting here , first bunch are the friendlies ( i asume they are in some way connected to the people behind the web site ) that do all those good luck commenting posts and the other bunch are the few people that actually tried the service out and are pretty much dissapointed how buggy and useless it is.
just another crunchy (recession) day 
This is a new site.. so I’m not even gonna try the program out (mostly because I’m too lazy as well)..
So on the concept: I’m usually negative towards a lot of the startup ideas in this blog, but on the surface the idea sounds great. It’s something companies would really want. The hard part is displaying all the data in a compelling format, and selling it to them.
@rajiv – thanks for giving us the benefit of doubt on improving it. There are quite a few things we have to add to it, including detailed influencer profiles, so please do check it out in a few weeks
@igzKap I took that in stride, cos I dont know anyone here that sais either good luck or its good. I think your might have a point, but its not the right one in this case. Regarding bugs sure, we do have them, and we’ll work hard to fix them quickly.
@henway – I hear you on the hard part and this is our beta, so I am sure we’ll keep improving.
@r00 you are not offbase so I think that’s something we did not do well. Give more examples and some case studies. We’ll get that up and running quickly in the next couple of days.
Just signed up- I quite like the interface and being encourahed to describe a campaign using a few key-words.
Gee, you think it would have made sense to test out the site before launching? Some of the tabs on the “solutions” page don’t match up. Not the best first impression.
I have explored a lot of tools in this space… and reading through comments here I wonder if BuzzGain is running several different server versions right now in Beta? It sounds like a people are experiencing different formatting.
While there are A LOT of free services out there, there are also A LOT of paid services that no one really knows about.
On my experience the user interface needs some work, but the results are mostly on-target. I will have to let things compile for a few days and compare them with my other queries.
Obviously this is a developing space and has a lot of commentary around it.
As a PR blogger, it’s amazing how many times I hear of people getting their pitches turned down by TechCrunch because they’re not “exclusive.”
Yet, TC runs a feature story on BuzZGain after this pitch was sent out to many folks, including my blog yesterday.
Brian is a great guy and a leader in the industry, so I certainly think he deserves us checking out his new service, which could very well be a disruptor in the industry. But still, what gives?
Hey Mukand – Sandra from BuzzLogic, just thought I’d weigh in on your last comment. On the contrary, our software (and ad network) is definitely about algorithmically detecting influencers. That said, your point about us looking at influencers in the context of conversations is also correct. We use several characteristics (such as deep link analysis and a look at the credibility and expertise authors have built on topics over time) to determine the role of influencers on specific topics and key words. Our technology is able to detect blogs connected together around these key topics, then determine influencers leading those conversations, as well as the social graphs of surrounding authors who are picking up on influencer content and spreading those ideas to their audiences. And yes, the same technology that powers our app for PR professionals is also leveraged to target and deliver ads across our ad network, which we launched last September.
sponcedeleon@buzzlogic.com
Sandra
Got it. I did get a chance to speak to a few folks regarding Buzzlogic and some of them are on our advisory board.
You definitely have a good fan following and I have to say have done a great job.
I do believe we are different, so we’ll just have to work harder to clarify what’s different about us.
@barry we have a ton of work ahead of us, we made some mistakes upfront by not clearly providing a video or tutorial so some guys got it right away, others did not. Not their fault, just ours. We learnt from that.
@guhmshoo we were in private beta for over 3 months prior to this, so even though we did some extensive testing a few things feel through the cracks. Noted your point though and we’ll fix them.
thanks.
Hi Mukund,
Here’s what I noticed – Twitter results fast, Blog results next, News just churns & churns & comes up zero, which for the big enterprise company I work for, just doesn’t seem likely.
It would be great if results could be stack ranked in order of PR. That way we can screen out “Kate’s Random Thoughts Blog” posts and focus on the important conversations to respond to.
Great start though!
Cheers,
Lorna
I haven’t evaluated this service yet but being able to follow specific writers rather than simply “monitoring buzz” is a truly great functionality.
This kind of thing will help savvy publicists quite a bit.
With the recession, DYI fad is everywhere. Cool concept but seems like a dummy down approach to PR.