BuzzLogic Makes Acquisition
BuzzLogic has been generating some attention for its buzz tracking technology that pinpoints where conversations are happening throughout the blogosphere on certain topics. As we’ve written, this can be an attractive tool for PR professionals or online marketers to home in on the right places to target their messages. Integration with AdWords’ work flow recently brought this capability to the next level.
The company has announced that it will acquire blogging software company Activeweave. I got to speak with BuzzLogic CEO Rob Crumpler at AdTech last week after his panel discussion/debate on Web 2.0. He contends this acquisition brings BuzzLogic the capability to more effectively track where people are going and what they are doing with blogs, to better qualify users and target ads. According to the release:
The acquisition will add new dimension to how BuzzLogic’s algorithms analyze online influence, enabling the company to strengthen and grow its Conversation Targeting advertising solution. Launched in the fall of 2007, Conversation Targeting surfaces connections between influential blogs and other social media as a means of predicting where to target online ad campaigns for its customers.
Blogs often see a very specific and qualified form of online viewership, which opens up lots of opportunity for targeted ad placement. The acquisition should help BuzzLogic continue to build this capability using Activeweave’s BlogRovR browser plug-in that passively tracks users’ blogging habits as part of a recommendation engine for relevant content.
Activeweave’s core product, the BlogRovR browser plug-in, was launched in 2007 and allows users to view relevant content from their favorite bloggers as they browse the Internet. The application works as a personalized search engine; every time a user views a Web page, BlogRovR fetches content from a list of pre-selected bloggers. If those bloggers have written about something similar, relevant content is displayed via collapsible tray within the browser. BlogRovR currently counts more than 180,000 registered users and monitors approximately 200,000 blogs.
Opportunities for local also start to come into focus when you consider local blogs or forums (Topix, Outside.in, Placeblogger, etc.), as well as community or user-generated content that happens around local listings (Yelp, Angie’s List). The company isn’t going down this road just yet but in the past has expressed to me that it could be of interest, given the increasing amount of user-generated chatter in the local space, and the size of market that surrounds it.
