Buzzient Leads The Way With Social Media

Company:

Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Buzzient Enterprise

Year Founded: 2007

Number of Channel Partners: 5

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Buzzient offers solution providers the opportunity to position themselves as thought leaders in social media for customers looking to take advantage of the new platform.

The Lowdown: As social media becomes more and more pervasive, vendors have begun looking for ways to harvest the information that is publicly available on the Web. That's where Buzzient and its Buzzient Enterprise come into play.

Buzzient was founded by two MIT grads who realized there was a lot of unstructured data being posted to the Web, explains Timothy Bernard Jones, CEO of Buzzient. Buzzient Enterprise is a Software-as-a-Service product that can be deployed to scour the Web with the goal of boiling down the prevailing sentiment and ranking it in an easy-to-understand way.

"There has been an orthogonal explosion of Web properties," said Jones. "There are important people talking about products and services on Web sites that don't get millions of hits a month, but influencers in the industry do read these posts."

Buzzient Enterprise tracks and ranks these influencers and the sentiment produced on a given topic and can present it to clients. For example, a blog post written by the head of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital about a new drug carries more social media cachet than a blog post by just anyone. Buzzient Enterprise captures that sentiment and ranks it. Then, when the client, in this case a life sciences company, wants to pitch that drug to a potential distributor, the company can use the data gathered by Buzzient for a more effective sales pitch.

The company is just into its third year of existence and is working to quickly develop a channel program for solution providers.

"Right now, we're taking a pragmatic approach with our channel partners," said Jones. "Solution providers take the services; we take the technology aspect. We can't do the services work, and they don't have the technology. It's a natural partnership."

For Jones, solution providers offer a channel into an existing customer base that could use the social media analytics that Buzzient offers. Currently, those referrals will pay solution providers 5 percent to 10 percent of the total deal as a referral bonus.

"There's an opportunity to be an evangelistic early adopter in this space," said Jones. "But there's also bread-and-butter business here for solution providers. There are a lot of companies that won't let this product run in the cloud, so it's got to sit in the data center. Solution providers can install an appliance and configure it. There are also systems integration opportunities."