I’ve been monitoring this segment of the industry for quite some time. The idea behind Buzz Manager is the monitoring of grassroots media to essentially guage market reach, brand awareness, and public opinion. Essentially, they provide reports of based on aggregate sets of data that is being generated throughout the web.

This is a young industry that is following the footsteps of the abundance of generated media, ie blogs, podcasts, etc that are syndicated in standardized formats across the web. The range of tools and niches availbable is outstanding. Imagine being able to track public opinion in election years based on information available in the blogosphere. Think of how you can track your brand, or your competitors. Sure, it’s a statistical subset of data but it’s also a previously unmined demographic. And, the information is free.

The market reach for tools like this are outstanding. Here is a segment of the press release put out by Sports Media Challenge today:

“Buzz Manager provides quantitative and qualitative results enabling clients to measure brand resonance in the marketplace. The Buzz Manager service collects, archives and analyzes relevant data drawn from millions of online word of mouth comments from thousands of fan forums, blogs, discussions and social networking sites then analyze them for the Executive Dashboard Report. The Report available online or delivered to PDA’s or via e-mail detail the real-time Buzz Rating, Exposure Rating and Trends. “We’re taking the pulse of NCAA Football,” said Sports Media Challenge President, Kathleen Hessert. “We know sports. And through our Buzz Manager service we’ll be able to determine who’s talking about the game, where they’re talking, what issues they care about most, and how passionate those fans are.”

NCAA Football Inks Deal for Buzz Manager Online Monitoring Service

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