Now that I have more time, I've been talking with more people about the tools that are available for monitoring and managing social media engagement.
Mukund Mohan and I recently had a chance to chat about his new product, BuzzGain, a monitoring service that focuses on building an overview of the people who write the most about a topic within different social media communities.
The BuzzGain service also integrates with various off the shelf services, including; coComment, a service for blog comment management. This means that a user is able to respond to any opportunities found in a community using BuzzGain, and using coComment track their response comments.
Buzzgain has also partnered with an ad network giving users the ability to place ads on the blogs of people with whom they have identified using the monitoring portion of the BuzzGain service.
Pricing is priced for the small company. Mukund hopes to develop a retail business model encouraging people to sign up without too much interaction with BuzzGain.
I was interested to learn about the company's customers and advisory board, large brand customers include; H&R Block, SocialText, SAP, BearingPoint, Honda, and Mitsubishi. The company already has over 130 customers and is not yet out of beta.
Mukund intrigued me when he told me that SAP and SocialText were using the product. Once I read the company's list of advisory board members I understood why. Mike Prosceno, VP of Social Media Relations and Social Media Evangelist at SAP is sitting on the board as is Ross Mayfield from SocialText, and my colleague Giovanni Rodriguez from the Society of New Communications Research.
Brian Solis is one of the co-founders of the company.
From the impressive list of people on the advisory board I am sure BuzzGain is receiving some great strategy advice, and also some large name accounts.
When I asked Mukund about CRM integration, he told me he is working on salesforce integration. While because of the advisory board relationship with Mike Prosceno, there is integration with SAP. I was wondering how much SAP is using BuzzGain compared to other tool vendors when dealing with its own customers?
