Digital Media Buzz > Agency Spotlight - BuzzLogic

Agency Spotlight - BuzzLogic

Agency Spotlight: BuzzLogic

BuzzLogic logo

Past Projects: PBS Sprout, Military.com, Organic Trade Association and many more.

Company Size: 35 employees
Company URL: www.buzzlogic.com

BuzzLogic Overview

Founded in 2004, BuzzLogic helps organizations and individuals understand and capitalize on the power of influential social media conversations as a means to effectively grow their business. Social media has changed the way companies operate. Publishing power has been democratized, and content is created and syndicated across the Web with lightening speed. With a suite of tools for bloggers and advertisers, as well as an ad network designed for today’s conversational media landscape, BuzzLogic offers all players in the media ecosystem insights and solutions for building a prosperous presence in social media.

Interview with Rob Crumpler, CEO of BuzzLogic

Tell us about your products — BuzzLogic Insights and Conversation Ad Targeting Platform & Network?
BuzzLogic delivers an advertising platform that analyzes and targets conversations taking place in conversational media, such as blogs and other socially connected publishers. It’s the core of our Conversation Ad Network. We help brands reach their customers in socially charged content where audiences are actively engaged, and we currently reach an audience of 33.3 million users. From research we conducted with Jupiter last October, we know that consumers are influenced by blogs to make purchase decisions; half of all blog readers admit blogs have influenced a purchase decision. Our targeting helps advertisers reach these consumers as they move down that sales funnel.

How is The BuzzLogic Conversation Ad Network different from the tons of other ad networks out there?
Buzzlogic’s unique proposition centers on our targeting technology, as well as the content in which we serve advertisements. We take social media advertising a step further than other networks or targeting platforms by enabling brands to place messages within relevant, topic-specific conversations. Our technology leverages a hybrid of search, contextual and social graph targeting to uncover conversation themes and identify the most credible and authoritative publishers driving those conversations. This approach enables brands to leverage the trusted relationship between bloggers and their audiences, instead of forcing ads on social media consumers who may not want to hear the message.

What type of company is best suited to take advantage of your products?
Any company or brand that is looking to engage consumers as they make decisions to purchase products or services can benefit from BuzzLogic. People are already online talking about brands and products, and BuzzLogic enables marketers to leverage the trusted relationship between bloggers and readers to purposefully engage customers.

What do you see as the current trends in the market place?
What we know for sure is that consumer media consumption habits have changed and almost all online media has become social and conversational. Where they once may have relied solely on large sites to do research on products, consumers are instead are turning to topic-specific sites to glean more credible and trusted information. Our research with Jupiter showed that 71 percent of blog readers visit more than one blog each session, and are finding blog content useful for purchase decisions — more than half said blogs with topical expertise were key sources.

While media consumption is changing, advertising agencies are still not completely equipped to easily integrate conversational media into their media buys and capitalize on the opportunity. Brands are reticent to jump in without the transparency and measurement that they have been accustomed to from traditional media sources. They want more insight and control to drive ROI, and steps are being taken to make that happen. We’re also seeing good steps in terms of finding industry-wide metrics. The IAB http://www.iab.net/socialads just released their social media best practices, and we think these metrics, like conversation size and site relevance, make a lot of sense for social media advertising.

Can you give us insight into the future of social media?
I wish I had the answers of what the future will hold, but we are just in the beginning of this explosion of social media, giving consumers more control than ever before. As more brands jump in and test social media, we’ll see success stories as well as more failures. There is a lot of promise in the medium, especially if you listen to what customers are saying about your brand, products and competitors and leverage that insight to deliver the MOST relevant information to each target customer. We will begin to see even more new and unique ways that keep consumers engaged with brands and products — I can tell you it’s going to be an exciting ride.