Musical Entrepreneur

Marketing Tips for Targeting the Blogosphere

 Blogs are experiencing something of a second wave. As blogging becomes even more mainstream, it's given an increasing number of consumers a shot at global publishing power. For the online marketing world, understanding how to leverage these independent publishers as a means to carry a message -- whether it's ad placement or editorial coverage -- is critical.

By 2012, approximately 145 million people -- or 67 percent of the U.S. Internet population -- will be reading blogs at least once a month, according to a recent study by eMarketer. Here's what online marketers and advertisers need to know in order to manipulate, exploit, and influence this medium:

Understand the psyche of the social media consumer
Advertising on blogs can mean reaching highly engaged pockets of readers. However, advertisers need to think differently about the psychology of the social media user to ensure their approach is on point. Often times, blog readers are very passionate about the topics they are researching, and they are highly invested in what they are doing at that exact moment. 

The potential pitfall? Distracting readers from the task at hand and annoying them in the process, which ultimately hurts your relationship with the blogger.  If you’re going to place an ad on a blog, you are going to have to be smart about how you’re diverting reader attention. Make sure your ad is an extension of the conversation.

Don’t forget that social media is “social”
Today’s online media landscape is a vast network of socially connected content -- think of it as a footprint. The ability to understand how this footprint was generated and the relationships among all the different touch points is invaluable for guiding both an ad strategy and a PR-focused one. 

Blogs shouldn’t be looked at as a static list of sites: They are platforms to host conversations. It’s your job to understand what those conversations are, who is leading them, and who is participating.

Define success upfront
It’s important to think about what success looks like before the start of every marketing campaign, especially in the social media space.  Current measurement standards like clicks and page views are under fire as marketers are able to reach a whole new level of engagement with prospective customers. 

For now, the best way to get around this issue is to think long and hard about what realistic examples of success look like for any campaign. Establish your ideal metric upfront, whether it's click-throughs, conversions, subscribers, or comment and pass-along velocity. 

Authentic distraction techniques
Now that it's time to write your ad copy, there are a few rules you should follow. Don’t replicate creative used for traditional ad buys for your social media campaign. Also, ensure you are writing for a specific audience, not a general one. Work to leverage the language uncovered in the conversation footprint. 

You can even ask trusted bloggers themselves for ideas on ad copy and test concepts out before launching a campaign. Posing questions or doing polls is another interesting tactic that helps draw the reader into the conversation around your brand. 

Understanding social connections holds powerful promise for marketers. The granddaddies of the social media ecosystem -- blogs -- are here to stay. Blogs account for the “media” in social media. They generate the kind of hyper-connected ideas and memes that are drawing customers away from the portals and into the long tail. It appears content is still king indeed. 

Goliath Courting David? Ex-adversaries (blogs and media) together can pack an ad punch

As the proliferation of blogs and user-generated content continues to transform the way traditional media is created, consumed—and monetized—are mainstream publisher "Goliaths" now embracing bloggers as trusted partners? And, are the "Davids" of the blogosphere realizing that the giant is a better friend than foe?

It's no secret that consumers have fallen in love with the blogosphere: Nearly 60 million Americans read blogs on topics spanning triathlon training to parenting to wine recommendations. However, as eyeballs shift to blogs and social media sites, traditional media behemoths are facing an exodus of readers who are being followed by advertisers clutching their marketing dollars. Case in point: Avenue A/Razorfish's recent Digital Outlook report, which points to its 2007 media spend spread across 1,832 Web sites—more than double the 863 properties that the firm bought media on in 2006.

So, the question remains: If social media is the 21st century's David, does this spell bad news for traditional publishing's Goliath?

Not necessarily. It turns out, in the sink-or-swim media business, David and Goliath may need each other to survive. What began as an olive branch offering (in the form of a few innovative steps from a handful of industry leaders) has transformed into a solid trend of old and new media worlds colliding—and tapping into each other's strengths as a result. At the crux is ad dollars, and the union of these unlikely partners will present some interesting opportunities for advertisers looking to stand out from the crowd.

It started innocently enough. Consider usatoday.com's "Community" feature. Launched a year ago, the program leverages social media tools to enable readers and citizen journalists to contribute comments, post reviews and interact with the reporters behind the stories. Or more recently, The Wall Street Journal's "SeenThis?" feature for Facebook showcases the publisher's effort to dip into the social networking phenomenon to lure more readers to its site.

But alliances are increasingly going beyond adding social media bells and whistles to a traditional site. More media companies are making strategic investments in blog companies and networks (take NBC's investment in Sugar Publishing). Newspapers like the Houston Chronicle have recruited readers who blog to contribute content to their sites. Others, like Washington Post Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), are employing a deeper collaboration with the blogosphere by blending blogs, traditional content and advertising. The WPNI Blogroll offering promises everyday bloggers a chance at fame and fortune via a rotating spot on the washingtonpost.com home page, along with the chance to run ads from WPNI's stable of advertisers.

The underlying force here, of course, is revenue. As ad spending continues to fan out across the fragmented media landscape, media organizations need to get creative to capture a larger piece of the pie. Offering readers a hybrid of traditional news along with relevant blog commentary and analysis puts big media in the position of hosting a user (and advertiser) experience that blends the best of both worlds.

This kind of integration gives online advertisers a chance to get in front of the very engaged consumers influential bloggers uniquely attract. The rise of social media has proven that page views can't always predict the level of engagement readers may have with an advertisement. By including on their sites the voices of online influencers who have demonstrated credibility and expertise, media companies can offer their advertisers unique access to highly targeted, passionate audiences as part of their overall ad buy. At the same time, a window into both professional headlines and independent commentary gives consumers multiple viewpoints around a specific theme or topic, which creates new opportunities for highly targeted ads along the way.

It's pretty clear Goliath needs David, but what kinds of benefits will bloggers reap from a friendly relationship with Goliath? First, by shining a very public spotlight on user-generated content, mass media is catapulting niche players onto the radar screens of the general public and major brand advertisers. Like traditional journalists, most bloggers aim to get their viewpoints and commentary out to as wide an audience as possible. When you layer advertising on top of that reach, the deal gets sweeter. By letting bloggers play on their stage, media companies are offering the little guy a share in the billions of online ad dollars being spent each year.

There you have it: Two forces, previously at odds, have gone beyond making nice and appear to be on the road to an interesting, and likely long-lasting, relationship. There are bound to be bumps along the way, but as new models emerge to make facilitating these relationships easier, smart publishers on both ends of the spectrum will successfully grow with this dynamic—not against it. After all, with David and Goliath as friends, the world may just turn up rosier than ever for advertisers.

Wagging the Dog: Is 2008 The Year To See Advertising ROI In The Long Tail?

Traffic = eyeballs = money.

This characterizes the age-old mentality of the online advertising world: the more traffic a site generates, the more potential consumers are viewing - and clicking on - online ads. But has the proliferation of social media turned conventional advertising wisdom on its head? Are the sites with the most traffic necessarily the ones yielding the best advertising performance?

This topic has been debated ad nauseam since the explosion of social media has captured a coveted slice of the collective consumer attention span. The concept of advertising on social media, like blogs, is nothing new, but since blog advertising has gone mainstream, the debate has gotten even more heated. To date, many marketing strategists have argued that meaningful advertising ROI can't be found by targeting niche blogs within the proverbial Long Tail -- primarily because the level of traffic required to produce results just doesn't exist. Simply put: for advertisers, the Long Tail does not scale.

A month into 2008, it feels like it's time to revisit this assumption. In fact, several trends point to the fact that 2008 may just be the year the Long Tail delivers the kind of performance advertisers are looking for.

The Long Tail and the Power of Influence

We all know that consumer Web usage patterns have changed. Americans aren't relying on the major "clearinghouse" sites for their daily information fix. Instead, people have become much more familiar with smaller sites housing information on niche interests.

There are nearly 113 million blogs in existence, spanning every conceivable, topic, interest and issue, with over 175,000 new blogs appearing each day. About 39% of American adults regularly refer to blogs - that's 57 million eyeballs consuming user generated content instead of mainstream media - and 65% of these folks are explicitly seeking someone's opinion.

Niche publishers in the Long Tail tend to hold two powerful characteristics core to attracting - and influencing - an engaged consumer audience: credibility and expertise on specific topics. An individual publisher's ability to exert these traits online - and, as a result, instill trust with their readers - is fueling a growing trend: consumers referring to the Internet before committing to a purchase. About 65% of online "power shoppers" always read consumer reviews and spend more than 10 minutes reading consumer generated media on products and services before they buy.

To date, credibility and expertise have been difficult to capture, measure and monetize on the Internet. As an industry, our collective emphasis on qualifying media buys has been a "bigger is better" mentality - the thinking is: if a lot people read it, the publisher must be a credible expert. While not necessarily untrue, we now know this premise is certainly not the case across board.

Naturally, brand advertisers will always require volume and scale, but, increasingly, they are looking beyond traditional page view and traffic numbers as a means to inform where to focus their ad budgets. Today's measurement options are inching closer and closer to truly predicting how keen a publisher's audience is to viewing your ad - allowing you to define campaign success by unique users, duration, hits, click-throughs, impressions, queries, sessions, streams, or level of engagement. Factoring the notion of topic-specific influence as a metric to evaluate ad spend - and going deeper in the Tail to find it -- will be key themes in 2008.

New Tools Get Tail Content Ready for Prime Time

Another key development is the increasing publisher savvy when it comes to generating and maximizing revenue. This is spilling over to Tail publishers who are realizing their advertising power, and playing an active role in connecting Tail content with advertisers' deep pockets via ad networks and other means.

Of course, the network players are stepping up to the plate to quickly facilitate this. Firms like Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan forecast that CPM rates are going to shoot up in 2008, in part due to the new and improved, razor sharp targeting technologies empowering the ad networks to slice, dice, aggregate and sell the best Long Tail inventory - all for a price. Like Amazon, umbrella networks' ability to house and sell Tail inventory on the content producers' behalf will spell collective success for everyone involved.

The net effect for advertisers? The ability to reach pockets of engaged consumers across thousands of niche content sites - housed under common themes and topics - in one single ad buy.

Putting Our Heads - And Tails - Together

Another key theme? The integration of popular, mainstream publishing (or "Head" content) with niche content in the Long Tail. Top publishers - everyone from Reuters to WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive - are seeing value in offering their readers a comprehensive experience that allows them to navigate between on-topic blog content and the headlines of the day. By shining a very public spotlight on content from the Tail, traditional media companies are catapulting niche players onto the radar screens of the general public - mainstream consumers, and big brand advertisers. In 2008 we'll see additional partner models emerge, enabling the Head and the Tail to band together and leverage each other's strengths - and make it even easier for advertisers to access Long Tail ad buys.

Time will tell whether the Tail will spell success in 2008 - or continue to elude advertisers. But for advertisers looking to surface the most engaged consumer possible, getting out of your head and into the Tail might be a good place to start.

Restoring the ad equilibrium for bloggers

As the world of "new new media" unfolds, consumers are in the driver's seat, and the content they are creating--via blogs and social networks--is proving to be highly influential.

So how come advertising on blogs is so dirt cheap? Sure, not every blogger's content is designed or even appropriate for hosting ad listings. And certainly, not every blogger with killer content desires to run AdSense. All the same, as more bloggers continue opening their sites up to contextual ads in an effort to monetize traffic, the balance of power will shift.

My hope? That more individuals will have the incentive to develop and contribute quality content--and that bloggers will command the bigger ad revenue that they deserve.

There has to be a balance between advertisers accessing the social media inventory that will perform and the influential bloggers getting paid what they deserve for aggregating quality traffic. Right now, there is an imbalance. More often than not, independent publishers creating compelling content are getting the short end of the stick. Advertisers haven't found them yet because they are looking for the wrong things.

Consumers are leaving the major Internet hubs in droves and spreading themselves thinly across the very fragmented online media landscape.

Recent trends speak for themselves. Consumers are leaving the major Internet hubs in droves and spreading themselves thinly across the very fragmented online media landscape. As people increasingly turn to blogs, social-networking sites, and other sources of user-generated media, the "big four"--Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner's AOL--have spent more than $10 billion this year to acquire companies and technologies to extend their network reach to new and differentiated areas online.

Blogs represent a fairly large chunk of that new or differentiated inventory, which is often referred to as the "long tail." Despite the phrase's hype and overuse, it's accurate to say "the tail" encompasses clusters of linking activity centered around influential hotspots--bloggers who command an audience on everything from tax advice and knitting to triathlon training and advice on high def TVs. The Internet, in a sense, has turned into a million "mini" Oprah Winfreys who have a strong pull with consumers. That is advertiser gold.

Despite being picked apart the last several years by marketers hungry to demystify their ad potential, blogs still have not attained real advertiser street cred. True, there have been some interesting industry developments on the blog monetization front--everything from pay per post to the birth of blog ad networks--yet, the jury is still out.

Online measurement complicates matters even further: no one can agree on how best to approach a standard of measurement, so marketers' collective comfort levels in dedicating budget to blog advertising is low. Page views got a real beating in the press last quarter, and, though the time-spent metric didn't fare much better, the overall take-away is that a popular site isn't necessarily an influential one. In this fragmented environment, the proxy for what a consumer is influenced by in terms of purchasing behavior is not necessarily tied to popularity.

That leaves advertisers asking big questions--how do we access quality blog ad inventory? How do we measure whether a blog is a good ad buy? How does this approach scale? And of course the biggie--is this safe for my brand?

One key to knowing how to answer these questions is understanding the influence of particular blogs on a particular topic. Isolating influence online is not as hard as it seems. Advertisers just have to know where to look, and what to look for--see beyond who the obvious leaders are, and instead focus on what these people are actually saying, who they go to for information, and who is listening in.

Unlike the offline world, influence online leaves a lasting footprint via links, trackbacks, and comments. These influential "conversations" become influential online content. And with more blogs looking to monetize, this influential content becomes quality ad inventory.

We're at a very interesting tipping point right now because these influential but hidden gems are becoming less hidden every day. Advertisers are ready to spend money on the goods if blogs can deliver. They have the cash; the problem to date has been a lack of places to spend. The quality stuff sells out first, leaving most advertisers to battle it out over the dregs.

This leaves an untapped opportunity for bloggers who have amassed expertise and have a dedicated following. To date, it has been those sites with the most eyeballs that win the revenue game. However, this philosophy isn't the way to crack the social media marketing code. What matters is the nature and the quality of relationship a consumer has with you and your content. That's the piece that will drive where ad dollars go.

If you are a blogger who aggregates an audience ripe for a relevant ad, and you're looking to get paid--sit tight. Advertisers are looking for you, and influence-targeting is making you easier to find. If you can give advertisers what they want, which are clicks and conversions, your premiums will go up. You are not cheap--and I'm confident you won't have to feel like it much longer.

Taking the Social Media Plunge: 6 Pointers

If you use traditional media assessment formulas to plan an ad strategy in the new world of social media, you're making a big mistake. Here's why.

If you knew of a way to drive lower cost-per-conversion rates for your online advertising campaigns, while super-charging ad performance, wouldn't you tell your media buyers to adopt that method, pronto?

Advertising against social media (on blog sites or within social networks) promises far better returns than traditional online content, but many advertisers are struggling when it comes to tapping into the power of these user-generated content (UGC) networks.

Social media -- in which word-of-mouth communication reigns -- is unparalleled at building passionate networks of like-minded people, particularly in the blogosphere. Of course, the nebulous world of social media is also a thorn in advertisers' collective sides due to a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the unpredictable content it generates and the difficulty in accurately measuring its impact. 

Why is social media so hard to corral and measure? One reason is that the people creating the kind of influential content that impacts consumer behavior aren't necessarily the people who claim the most eyeballs. An "influencer" may have a small audience from a numbers' standpoint but can also have a massive impact on your target customers' buying habits.

The recent Nielsen//NetRatings announcement about the new "time spent" metric underscores this issue. The industry shift away from the page view as the unrivaled metric king demonstrates that the number of hits on a website doesn't necessarily equal the most value for your advertising dollar.

Since the most influential blogs don't always have the biggest audiences, traditional online advertising models can be far off the mark when it comes to reaching the most qualified leads.

For example, an ad buy targeted to a search result is unlikely to place you in front of networks of people with a passion for the product or service you're offering. However, a blog that draws together a community of like-minded readers -- who engage in discussions and share ideas and opinions -- has the loyal audience that can significantly drive up conversion rates.

Initial research bears this out: A recent study from BlueLithium Labs compared ads on sites with UGC, and sites without such content. The ads on non-UGC sites had a 32 percent higher conversion rate; however, due to the lower cost of advertising on UGC sites, the cost-per-conversion for non-UGC sites was 58 percent higher.

Advertisers are sensing this promise. The latest research from eMarketer shows that ad spending on websites that feature UGC (like photo and video sharing) is expected to rise to $4.3 billion by 2011.

The key is for advertisers to define the kind of social media (blogs, for example) that best fits their overall brands and specific campaigns, then design an effective way to surface the content that will truly deliver from an ad perspective.

Finding the people who influence consumer behavior
Locating influencers is a tough online challenge, especially in an internet landscape characterized by traditional media, UGC, social networks and 12 million blogs in the United States alone. Popularity ranking and subjective authority evaluations of a particular website or blog fall short when you take a closer look. A blogger who is considered an authority on a given topic might hold great influence when it comes to that subject but could have less or zero influence if a new topic is introduced. Likewise, a specific web page may be "popular" but ranks very low on the influence scale on a specific topic within a certain context.

A year or so ago, online marketers were advised to listen to online conversations in order to gauge what was being said about their products. Listening will always be critical, but as social media matures as a marketing channel, zeroing in on the content to actually engage with it is becoming increasingly important for brands.

Fortunately, new technologies are making it easier to find the influencers who matter more quickly. And some marketers are finding that, when it comes to social media, simply building relationships with online opinion leaders can create marketing events that deliver measurable business impact.

Screenlife Games, a Seattle-based maker of DVD games, recently used influence-targeting technology to build awareness of the 2007 edition of its "American Idol" game, based on the TV series of the same name.

Screenlife was able to hone in on blogs most likely to attract potential buyers of the game. This was accomplished by searching for conversational phrases specific to the 2007 season, such as "Melinda is the best," that would indicate the presence of a dedicated crowd of "American Idol" fans, or fans of Screenlife games, and not just a blog that mentioned the "Idol" show once or twice.

"We're able to catch general fans of the show and focus in on specific conversations about our game," explains Tony Roscelli, Screenlife's director of consumer research. "We can find out what they like and parlay it into marketing programs."

By monitoring conversations, and understanding who is interacting with the most passionate customers and to what effect, advertisers can generate lists of niche blogs and websites they may not have been aware of, and integrate this data into their online advertising strategy.

Another example of maximizing the power of social media can be seen with Protuo.com, a provider of web-based career portfolio management services. Protuo was in search of the elusive "influencer" audience when it decided to leverage social media technology to help uncover blogs focusing on career and human resources issues.

By monitoring online conversations about recruiting and hiring strategies, the company was able to identify the bloggers most likely to draw an audience that would use Protuo's services. Protuo then invited key bloggers to review its offerings, which spurred discussion and ultimately increased traffic and Protuo.com registrations. During its influence campaign, overall traffic to Protuo.com has risen 27 percent. What's more, Protuo found that traffic from influential websites converted to registration 40 percent better than online leads generated from other sites.

Before you set out to identify the online influencers that are most important to your advertising strategy, make sure you and your team understand how social media requires a different plan of action.

1. Know your marketing goals: Be careful not to get roped into helming a social media marketing or advertising effort simply because it's trendy. Before embarking on these initiatives, take the time to understand what you want from your ad spend. How do you want creators and consumers of social media to respond to your ad efforts? What is their ideal experience? Clicking on a text link off of a blog post, or reading blog coverage of your company from a source they trust and traveling to your site via an embedded link? Figure out the answers to these questions before jumping into a social media advertising program.
2. Rethink the definition of marketing communications: If you use traditional media assessment formulas to plan an ad strategy in the new world of social media, you're making a big mistake. Social media is much more than another way to communicate with your target market; it's a way for your customers to trade information that helps them make better decisions, given that they've become somewhat hardened about marketing spin. These days, they prefer to take their cues from other consumers whom they trust. For a social media-based ad campaign to be successful, it needs to be based on authentic interactions at every stage of the customer lifecycle, not just when you're pushing messages out to them.
3. Find the influencers: You can't plan an online advertising strategy until you know how to reach an audience that's primed to hear your messages. You need to identify where the conversations that connect to your marketing goals are taking place, and who is shaping those conversations. Since influence in the social media world isn't always determined by audience size, this can lead to some interesting surprises. The process of finding influencers turns some conventional ideas about marketing upside down. Rather than first searching for advertising targets and then deciding where and when to advertise, the process begins by determining what's being said, and figuring out who is saying it.
4. See beyond the assumed customer base: Marketers need to recognize that influencers are not always the current customers for their company's products and services. They can be former customers who have become dissatisfied, they may be fans of your competitors, or they may simply have strong opinions about your market. The ability to see beyond your own customer base is an important skill for social media engagement.
5. Redefine what "advertising" means: It's not just about placing an ad anymore. For instance, companies like Protuo can use a social media engagement strategy to generate online leads (which is the objective of many paid search ad campaigns). As a result, the company was able to generate traffic that converted to action better than incoming leads from typical online advertising methods. Marketers don't necessarily associate "influencer marketing" with hard metrics, but the dense network of links that power social media conversations enables consumers reading their favorite blogs to quickly jump to the kind of content that will trigger a purchase.
6. Take a multi-pronged approach: In social media, traditional online ad placement isn't enough to engage your potential customers. Participation is a key step. Comment on the blogs of key influencers. Write your own posts in order to challenge them on important topics. Join in the conversation instead of waiting for the conversation to come to you.

Finally, a key piece of advice for any marketer who wants to stick a toe in the social media waters: If this is your first foray into a social media advertising effort, don't invest too much in the first campaign. Do it quickly, do it cheaply and change strategies if needed. The good news is that social media -- with its low cost of entry and speed of access -- lends itself well to this kind of marketing journey.

Content is still King, but can it Perform?

The recent online advertising buying-spree seems game changing.  Or does it?  Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, Microsoft's (my alma mater) acquisition of aQuantive and Yahoo's acquisition of RightMedia together are big news.  Over the past few months, technologies that manage the flow of more than $10 billion in ad spend have been snatched up by the publishers who control the ad inventory.  So the real question is... how do the advertisers win?

At the end of the day, content is still king.  And content that truly performs (high click-throughs/conversions) is even mightier.  But will the incentive for these oligopoly-hungry publishers to produce/syndicate great content dissipate as the 'third-party' nature of the targeting technologies vanish?  Google seems to be putting a good foot forward.  Jennifer Slegg had some cool things to say about how Google is improving their syndicated publisher (AdSense) network.  As Google weeds out the producers of bad content, it will be fun to follow the performance metrics of AdSense (we've been doing a lot of AdSense testing at BuzzLogic using our Influence algorithms), and see how advertisers react. My guess is that even after Google has weeded out the MFA sites, advertisers will still be demanding further performance optimization of the AdSense network.  And heck, those advertisers will be voting with their dollars.

As Emily Riley discusses here, Microsoft is extending its inventory by adding the DRIVEpm publisher network.  I'm glad to see MSN finally take another step forward in the syndicated publishing space. Adding behavioral targeting to the mix via DRIVEpm seems like a good move to me.  But Bill Gates needs to go a lot further to build a better mousetrap than Google's.  I'm curious to see how their strategy plays-out, as they attempt to add performance-content to their network.

Yahoo's main issue with YPN to date has been gaining enough insight into the power of their publisher network in order to monetize it effectively.  Delivering that inventory via RightMedia's 'exchange' platform should ultimately allow the market to drive best pricing.  But it still seems very hit-or-miss on which content or publishers to target in the first place - especially in today's user generated content-on-the-fly world.

A rising tide lifts all boats, and that's what I think this latest flurry of acquisitions will do.  I like to see this enormous gathering of brain-power all focused on moving online advertising forward.  At the same time, having worked at MSN for seven years, I know first-hand that big ships take a long-time to turn.  Microsoft, Google and Yahoo will be sorting through strategy, execution and culture issues for many months to come - slowing their ability to innovate.  The time is right for young companies to lead the next generation of online advertising technologies while the big-guns sort out their recent purchases. 

Progress, Press and Buzz

We've been having fun over at BuzzLogic. After almost 3 years of development we finally announced the commercial availability of BuzzLogic Enterprise, the first product on our roadmap to help businesses, publishers and people tap into online influence and use this insight to improve their bottom-line. We've had some wonderful people weigh-in on our progress... and we're very humbled at the coverage.

Oliver Ryan at Fortune Magazine wrote this about us. We spent and hour and a half with Oliver on press tour in NY a couple months ago.  Very enjoyable interview.  Dave Churbuck and Tom Parish chimed in with their thoughts.  Dave has been a friend of the company for more than a year now.  He was an awesome beta tester - and - was willing to take VC phone calls during our fund raising.  What can I say?  We love the guy.  Tom had a chance to catchup with Todd and has also become a huge supporter.  Co-founder Mitch Ratcliffe also gathered some friends and thoughts on our blog.  additionally, Jennifer B., Bobby Lehew and many others weighed in with their perspective.  Even Jeff Jarvis gave some support - and 'customer support' has become his middle name.

Catherine Holahan also gave us a nice mention in a recent BusinessWeek article.  We've also been working with Steve Hamm over there, to help him do some 'conversation discovery' on stories he's working on.  We have a little ways to go to help mainstream editors; our hope is to enable them to stay on the leading edge of the topics they cover - and engage those influential communities around their content. Paul B. Walker at GCI Group had some interesting - though a bit tough to hear - feedback related to an earlier version of our beta product.  We honestly love hearing this kind of stuff - it's exactly the kind of insight we need to make our product stronger.

I can't leave out Tom Foremski's story - he nailed it.  Tom met with us three times.  His thoroughness really shines through.  I enjoy the articulate nature of his writing, too.

Reading press coverage about your product or service is always a learning experience - a case in point is Adrienne Sanders' story about us in the San Francisco Business Times.  Peter Kim's mention of our index being limited to crawling only social media was incorrect - our index counts influential media, but also gives our customers a 360 view into how mainstream media and corporate sites are impacting the conversation as well.  This tells me we need to do a better job of highlighting our core differentiators as we talk about BuzzLogic - luckily we're hanging out with Peter again this month, so hopefully we'll get it right this time!

InfoWorld was a fun interview.  Ephriam Schwartz enjoyed that we're testing our technology to predict pop-culture trends, such as who will win American Idol.  The passionate comments from his viewers are telling.  We're still waiting to see if Melinda will win Idol, but Sanjaya has been booted off the show since Ephriam's article broke.  And, Melinda Doolittle did remain in the final-four in last night's show!  Click the thumbnails below to see the latest metrics for Melinda from the BuzzLogic dashboard...

We've been having fun.  And we have some exciting technologies coming, too.  The media landscape has changed forever.  We're very focused on delivering technologies that solve the problems our customers are facing, and support new ways for them to improve their bottom-line through new business models that have previously not been possible.   

BVI Island Hopping

Aside from music, sailing has always been my great passion.  I got my first taste when I was 10 years old, sailing lasers on many Sierra Mountain lakes we frequented during our Boy Scout weekend-get-aways.  At UCLA I joined the sailing club and took every course the college and the Coast Guard had to offer.  By the time I was 22 I found myself captaining a 43 foot Mason around the Greek Isands.  After college, I raced and raced and raced on other people's boats until I could afford my own, which I ended up living on for eight and a half years.  In the thirty-five years I've been sailing, I've sailed the entire west coast of the United States including up the Inside Passage in Canada and as far south as Peuerto Vallarta in Mexico.  I've even done some sailing in Australia.  But my favorite... has always been the Caribbean.  I've chartered there via The Moorings five times.  My favorite spot in the Caibbean... the BVIs.

My girlfriend and I had a wonderful vacation there this past January.  And man, what an experience!  Ten days of island hopping, snorkeling, hiking, reading, dancing to reggae music and sampling the finest conch dishes and rum punches wherever we went.  They say a picture tells a thousand words.  I hope some of these photos will share how much fun we had.  I hope you will enjoy.  And I hope you will share other cool ideas for sailing vacations.  To me, they are the best.

Also, the BVIs are very safe from a traveler's perspective.  But I did recently read an article in the Washington Post about travelers getting robbed.  Do be careful.

PS - All these photos were taken on my Nikon D70 in case you were wondering...

A Million Mini-Oprahs

What does it mean to be influential?  We all know it means something but what does it really mean?  And how can it be measured?  Some would say influence is a measure of the impact of an opinion propelled by a gathering fulcrum of credibility, anticipation, focus, attention and action.  Well, that's how I think about it anyway.  And I've been steeped in the thought of what it really means for the last couple of years as we've tested and refined our influence algorithms at BuzzLogic. 

Oprah is my favorite example of an Influential.  Over time she built a trust relationship with her ever-growing audience.  People enjoy her views and often anticipate aligning themselves with whatever she promotes next.  Books are big for Oprah.  Her credibility on what to read is so powerful that millions of people buy books based on her recommendations.  She proves her influence as a powerful market force over and over again.

Certainly, everyone can't enjoy Oprah's level of influence on what books to buy.  And at the same time, Oprah can't be influential on everything.  Nobody is influential on everything.  People tend to be influential about their passions.  On the things they know most about.  On the things they care most about.  On the things other people look to them for answers.  The attention of an audience steeps in knowing there are shortcuts to the answers they seek on specific areas of interest. 

But even Oprah can't be influential on everything.  Take superstring theory for example.  Certainly, Oprah is not influential on the fundamentals of superstring theory.  If Oprah tried to explain that time actually slows down when you're in a fast moving vehicle or speeds up when you're in the mountains - would you believe her?  I can almost see her tilting her head sideways with an incredulous look on her face at the thought of explaining the concept.  Certainly she wouldn't enjoy near the level of influence as compared to someone like Brian Greene who is an expert on the subject.

Recently at DEMOfall, a blogger came up to me and told me BuzzLogic was "ruining his game".  Needless to say I was a little curious.  I asked him to elaborate and he told me he had spent so much time trying to climb the authority ranking on Technorati and now BuzzLogic is proving he's not as influential as Technorati says he is...  I asked him what he typically blogs about.  He said predominately technology and sometimes politics.  I asked him if he blogs about "cat food"?  "Of course not", he said.  I explained to him that there are people who blog about cat food who are very influential on the subject - and Purina wants to know who they are.

BuzzLogic blows up the "A List" and in its aftermath thousands of "Mini A Lists" sprout.  As a result, a million Mini-Oprahs become discoverable.  Wrapping context around influence helps marketers better understand their blogging customers.  Helps bloggers better understand their import in relation to the marketers who are listening.  And helps blog readers better interact with the marketers who sponsor the content that matters most.

Rocking Web 2point2

I always get excited when my next music gig falls into place.  A fun event.  A great crowd.  And a chance to share my deep personal interest in playing music.  It's always something fun to look forward to. 

Just the other day, Chris Heurer and his fiancee Kristie Wells invited me to play the Web 2point2 Release Party coming up on November 9th.  I was humbled to get the invitation.  How could I refuse?  A bunch of my industry colleagues all packed into the trendy club Fluid Ultra Lounge - I'm in.

My schedule is super hectic right now given our Series A activities.  But tuning up the songs allows me some relaxation and the opportunity to enjoy my guitar, a passion I truly love.   I started getting serious about the guitar about 8 years ago.  I always wanted to learn to play.  I finally got my chance during the many years of rainy weekends I spent in Seattle while working for Microsoft.  Then the planets really aligned when I first heard the "Live at Luther College" album by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds.  The intricacies of the two guitars together haunted me with intrigue.  Dave's voice is cool, too.  I wanted to be able to play like that.

I researched and connected with an incredible guitar instructor, Pete Caruso.  I never would have advanced my playing so quickly without him.  About a year later we both got a good laugh.  Pete reminded me about our first lesson together.  I showed up with my guitar and the "Live at Luther College" CD.  I played the CD and told Pete those are the songs I wanted to learn.  He asked me to play a song on my guitar so he could get a sense of my ability (I could play maybe 3 or 4 chords at the time).  I played a little.  And Pete surprisingly kept a straight face.  The music was far beyond my ability.  But with some dedication and building on the foundation of music training I received from my father, I started picking it up pretty quickly.  After I had some of the songs under my belt, Pete jokingly confessed his initial skepticism - and I could tell he was proud of how much I had accomplished.

A year or so later a band started to form.  Since I was learning so many Dave Matthews songs I called it mostlyDave.  The next thing I knew, we were playing in front of 350 people at a charity event to celebrate my 40th birthday.  It was quite a party.  We played at the Seattle FUNC (the old Red Hook Brewery warehouse).  I had friends fly in from various parts of the country.  A bunch of my friends from Microsoft came.  Each of the band members had their clans there as well.  Being on stage in front of that many people was a rush.  I still felt like a novice behind the guitar and microphone but I had a great birthday.  Our friends seemed to have fun, too.  A few new couples got together for the first time that night.  And one of the couples ended up getting married.

We started gigging around Seattle at bars, private parties and charity events.  We had seven people in the band back then.  It was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, when I moved back to San Francisco in 2003, the band broke-up.  It was a bummer.  I needed to start over.  I met a great sax player in the City, Andrew Tobin.  We started playing as a duo at bars here in the City which was a lot of fun.  But eventually he moved back to Colorado.  Scott Craig, our lead guitar player from Seattle, moved to San Francisco around that same time.  He and I started tuning up the songs in anticipation of playing some gigs, but then he got in a bad bike accident.  He does join me at the gigs still, but unfortunately he's not able to play as many songs as he used to.  I continue to keep the mostlyDave set list alive and look forward to getting connected with more musicians in the future.

I'm very excited to play the Web 2point2 Release Party!  If you're reading this and you're in San Francisco on November 9th, I hope you can join us.

I don't have any grand illusions about where playing music will take me.  I keep it in my life because I enjoy it.  And because the people that go to our gigs have always been so supportive.