Funding for Blog Assessment Firm

San Francisco-based startup BuzzLogic has won $9.6m (£4.9m) in venture capital, with which to develop tools and services aimed at defining and measuring influence in social media such as blogs.

The firm identifies 'influencers', defined as posters or bloggers generating a significant number of relevant inbound links and comments on a specific topic within a specific timeframe. Its four criteria for a blog to be 'influential' are its overall traffic and the number of inbound links; the traffic it generates for the marketer; the contextual relevance of blog postings to customers' key words or area of focus; and the frequency with which it publishes content on these topics.

BuzzLogic now has just over $11m in funding in total. It is still conducting tests and says it has 80 clients signed up for trials. Subscription prices are expected to start from $500 per month.

The company describes its service as 'very different from the brand monitoring and analysis services that can describe what a small sample of bloggers was thinking a few weeks ago, not what is happening right now.' According to CEO Rob Crumpler, the startup 'addresses a clear marketing need: how to understand and engage with social media such as blogs. We believe that understanding who is influential will help marketers better focus their listening, and better direct their influencer-oriented marketing initiatives.'

BuzzLogic is on the web at www.buzzlogic.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.