Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
Serph - What’s Its’ Buzz Tracking Werph?
There have been loads of products purported to do real-time buzz tracking in the last couple of years. Some cost a lot of money (Buzzlogic, Coremetrics), and some of them are free (Google Trends, Alexa Stats, Pagerank).
(Had it not been for Google Trends, I wouldn’t have known that a New Kids on The Block Reunion may be in the offing…)
When a relatively new entrant comes onto the market, especially a free one, I’m always wondering how solid the data will be.
I ran into Serph’s creator, Hiten Shah, at a Songbird event a few weeks ago, and he encouraged me to check it out. Signup for Serph was easy enough, and it actually allowed me to bypass the usual email registration. I was also fairly impressed that this free service allowed domain blacklisting. For example, if you’re searching for information about your company (i.e. “LaunchSquad”), you’re not going to want information from your own website reporting into the data you’re trying to obtain. It ain’t buzz if you said it about yourself, right?
The backstory on Serph is a little unusual; instead of being created as a product by a software company, it was compiled by ACSSEO, a social media marketing and SEO agency, who have some cool clients (HP, Dogster, TechCrunch).
While Serph’s queries are not lightning-fast (20-40 seconds, typically), the total aggregation of data looks pretty neat, and a lot cleaner than, say, what one would get in a Google Alerts email. The ideal way to track the Serph information, as far as I can tell, is in one’s RSS feeds, especially since the way it reports into feeds looks really nice and neat.
My initial queries for LaunchSquad’s name and the MetzMash social media blog (my other blog) seem to have yielded all of the right hits. While Serph may not be the most robust tool out there, but for brands on a budget, Serph is definitely a clean-looking jumping-off point for buzz tracking.
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i heard that the new kids reunion tour is a big hoax. tragic. from danny wood’s official blog: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=243950610&blogID=352444411
Posted by Lara: 10:06 pm, January 28th, 2008