BuzzGain enables marketers to hear online voices

Keeping tabs on what's being said about your brand or products on the Internet is a daunting task. There are a multitude of social networking sites, blogs, message boards, podcasting sites, video blogs, micro blogs and consumer review sites on which conversations are being held that you need to know about.

Likewise, it's important to identify and communicate with major influencers in the social media space, those who can help get your messages out.

For big businesses, monitoring and PR companies increasingly have the manpower and systems in place to identify and track online conversations, but the service comes at a price which is often out of reach of small to medium sized outfits.

But, there is help for SMBs in the form of DIY solutions such as BuzzGain which claims to enable SMBs to 'listen, learn and analyze' across 150 million social media sources. Users monitor keywords to discover relevant conversations and are provided with lists of news sites, blogs, and other channels that have recently featured content relating to those keywords.

In addition, individual writers and bloggers can be tracked, and it's reported that BuzzGain has partnered with an ad network, allowing users to place ads alongside the posts of bloggers they have identified.

According to blogger Louis Gray, who also advised start-up BuzzGain, the tool doesn't run in isolation. "Its data is pulled from popular Web sources, including Technorati, which helps determine sites' influence in terms of external link activity, and Compete.com for estimated traffic," wrote Gray.

Tags: blogs, BuzzGain, influencers, monitoring, online conversations, PR, social media, tracking