a brand’s specific product lines, or at a macro-level to gather a sense of their wider market. One application of Buzzient on this macro-level is eyeing potential acquisition targets, Jones says. It helps companies see what other companies in their industries are up to, and also alerts them to names that they might not have previously considered competitors, based on which brands show up in Buzzient’s Internet-crawling software.
The technology can also help customers advertise in a more cost-effective way, by tracking which websites might be “high-influence,” even if they don’t get huge amounts of traffic, Jones says. The software can determine which sites are read by users that are highly likely to tweet or talk about the content to a big network. Customers can typically advertise on these sites more cheaply than on those that have a bigger volume of visitors and charge higher advertising rates.
Buzzient’s prices reflect its level of sophistication, says Jones, noting that his company isn’t one of the many low-cost, “cheap and dirty” analytics software providers out there. Buzzient software subscriptions go for anywhere from $500 to $41,000 per month, with the average sale price at $5,000, he says. The company has about 12 employees, a mixture of part-time and full-time, and is adding an additional office in the “innovation district” of Boston’s Seaport neighborhood later this month.
As far as future product strategy goes, Jones sees a commodity in the Buzzient data itself, he says. The company is exploring the possibility of selling the information its software gathers directly to those looking to “slice and dice” the data. But the company says it is being cautious not to target the identity or information of individual users, and is instead focused on looking at data on a big-picture, aggregated level.
