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.
