Lara Kretler’s blog

Thanks to all of you, my last blog post about Twitter was my most successful entry yet into the blogosphere. I am excited by all of your comments here and conversation about it via Twitter and email. I’m hoping to give you more of the same – information you can really use – with this post about a few cool free tools for measuring online buzz.

Google Trends
At May’s Ohio Web Leaders conference, Bill Balderaz introduced me to the joys of Google Trends. Using this tool, by stringing words together separated by commas, you can measure the online buzz of Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader (Darth blows his son away) or Barack Obama vs. John McCain (Obama’s slightly higher). The Google Trends tool is using several sources, including search patterns and news coverage. One nice feature for us PR geeks is that it shows spikes and correlates them to mainstream media coverage – this is especially cool when you’re putting in client names and seeing that the work you’re doing is making a real difference.

Webbed-O-Meter
It’s worth noting that Bill Balderaz invented a cool tool of his own for measuring online buzz. The Webbed-O-Meter, which specifically measures the buzz around a specific site. Check it out – just plug in your site’s URL and based on a series of metrics, it will spit back out a number between 0 and 100 which is your site’s online buzz rating. It’s fun to track this over time and see how you can move the needle through good PR and online marketing campaigns. I just checked out the buzz scores for Twitter (a decent 61.1 out of 100) and Plurk (a measly 41.1 out of 100). Let’s check back on that in a month or two and see how it’s changed.

BlogPulse
Now I’ve just discovered yet another tool, Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ BlogPulse. As you might guess, this one specifically measures blog coverage as an indicator of online buzz. There are a lot of crazy tricks on this site and I’ve only just begun to experiment with them. BlogPulse Trend Search allows you to create graphs that visually track buzz over time for certain key words, phrases or links. You can compare search terms/links in isolation, or use all three fields to compare search terms/links against others.

For example, it turns out PR wins over advertising when it comes to blog mentions over the past six months. PR FTW! Oh sorry, advertising folks, did I just say that out loud? Here’s a better example – exercise wins over diet. Or take a look at Ohio v.s. Michigan, which is apparently as fierce a battle in the blogosphere as it is on the college football field (although if you click through, most of the drivers are political and not sports related).

Why track buzz?
So, aside from amazing your friends and annoying your coworkers, what are some other ways to use these tools? I’m hoping you’ll chime in here and share some of your ideas. Obviously, they are great at the beginning of any new marketing or PR campaign to track baseline buzz and be able to show results over time. I especially like the way the Google Trends and BlogPulse tools show major news events so those of us in PR can see the fruits of our labors. These are also useful in new business settings to wow prospects with your knowledge of their brands, industry and competition. What else? I suppose these tools could potentially be useful in pitching media – either to show that a topic or story idea is new and has not been covered much (which can sometimes pique their interest), or to show that a topic or brand has good online buzz but hasn’t been covered much by traditional media yet, so the reporter you’re pitching could potentially be the first.

Does buzz matter?
If anyone is still wondering how important online buzz is, I think Senator Obama would agree with me that it’s critically important. Online buzz is an indication of blogger coverage of a topic or issue, but it’s also related to traditional media coverage as well. When online buzz rises to a dull roar about a particular brand or idea, that drives coverage by major mainstream news outlets – just look at recent Twitter coverage by Business Week, CNN and more. So how do you get out in front of those traditional news giants with a story so juicy they just have to pounce on it? Know your client, be creative, and watch the online buzz meters so they can be your guide.

What do you think – are these just fun toys to mess around with online, or can you see some other business uses for these online buzz tools? I’d love to hear your ideas.