Marketing Relationship Platform BuzzStream Unveils Search Engine For Influencers

Chasing the buzz. From the BuzzStream website.

Awhile back, BuzzStream co-founder and CEO Paul May told me, his company put out an Advertising Guide to Content Promotion.

They wanted to promote it, and they began looking online for people who have written about that topic. They used Google and BuzzSumo, a tool that allows a marketer to find the best-performing content on a topic.

His staff had to then find the people behind the posts, see what else they had written, find and collect those other links and so on. It was, May said, like “going down a rabbit hole.”

So this week, his Austin, Texas-based company unveiled a free open beta of a new Discovery search engine for finding complete info about influencers.

This new offering is “a huge jumping off for the company,” he said — not really a new direction, but a more complete realization of BuzzStream’s original vision of bringing together the relationship-building tasks of PR, SEO and social media marketing. The company was founded in 2008 and says it currently has about 2,000 customers, including agencies and in-house marketers.

BuzzStream’s main tool, called Outreach, helps marketers find, organize and maintain relationship-based marketing tasks, like organic link building, generating publicity from leading experts on a given subject and so on.

With the new Discovery search engine, you enter a search term, and the engine returns a listing of people who have written on this topic. The results are sorted by the most influential — that is, the ones whose posts have the most shares and who have written for the most widely recognized publications or sites. You can filter by the number of Twitter followers and other parameters.

Other displayed info includes a short bio, list of publications the person has written for, presence on social networks and connections to other people related to that topic.

Once identified, May said, the influencers can be approached with such requests as creating topic-specific content, acting as a brand ambassador or helping with publicity. Additionally, their blogs or social presences can be good locations to run topic-specific ads.

Neither Discovery nor Outreach is specifically designed for the kind of influencer marketing that, say, a NeoReach or TapInfluence handles, where a YouTube star with a zillion followers might be paid a fee to make a short video promoting the virtues of a new face cream.

May noted that while BuzzStream’s platform is not specifically designed to support fee-for-promotion, the marketer can make the new relationship whatever the two parties agree it should be.

If you’re a BuzzStream customer, you can export the Discovery search results to Outreach, where you can perform such tasks as segmenting contacts into email lists based on topical relevance or relationship history or tracking communications over email and Twitter.

May pointed to influencer search engines like Little Bird or Traackr as primary competitors, although he noted that “our differentiation is profile completeness and connection to the full process of ‘influencer relationship management,’” including finding, nurturing, outreaching and measuring.

Secondary competitors, he said, include media databases like Cision and Meltwater, but he added that Discovery has greater depth in small- to mid-sized authors and influencers. BuzzSumo is “technically a competitor,” he said, but added that their tool can also be used in conjunction with Discovery.