We've been watching the conversation evolving around our product launch at DEMO last week and wanted to call out some specific postings that are reaching into discussions of particular interest to us:

Chris Saad likes our philosophy and the growing transparency evolving in social media. An active developer of attention technology (see my posting at ZD Net about the attention profile markup language Chris is working on and the general challenge of finding the economic impetus for radical market change), Chris was intrigued by influence as a metric when he saw our product. We see attention and influence as the two critical elements to understanding value in social media and will be paying close attention to APML. I'd like to get involved personally in the specification....

Colleagues from previous lives are responding to the BuzzLogic announcement, as well. K.D. Paine, who worked with our Bob Schettino, and a leading blogger on PR research and metrics is polling the PR community to see what folks think about BuzzLogic.

We were also pleased to be picked by the media panel at DEMO's closing dinner as one of the coolest companies at the conference, as reported here by Renee Blodgett.

But not everyone likes what we're doing. InformationWeek says we're not disruptive, concluding that "if you need a service to identify who the influencers are, you've already failed at your marketing job." As a longtime journalist, I certainly know from whence this opinion comes: There is an assumption among journalists that marketing is like covering a beat for a magazine, which requires you know all the "influencers" on the topic, and in many ways that was true of marketing before the Internet. Social media have marketers scrambling to find their way, because the scale of communication has been transformed.

InformationWeek is judging us against the pre-social media form of influencer. Magazines like InformationWeek contributed to the establishment of gurus with long-standing reputations for knowing all about, say, the Apple Macintosh computer or IP security. In social media, ideas can come from anywhere and, depending on the way those ideas are spread, they can have a lot of impact or very little impact regardless of their provenance.

The new influencer isn't someone waiting for the reporter to call to get the next pungent comment for an upcoming article, they are actively publishing. Who they are is changing constantly. An important insight can start with someone's first posting about their experience with a new product and marketers have very limited resources to deal with this environment (or, will be limited until they figure out how to really excel in this much more complex market).

In the old days, there was a stable group of less than 50 influencers a marketer could deal with--partly because the press made these influencers influential and kept them that way by returning to them repeatedly--but this is a different era. We hope the folks at InformationWeek will take the time to understand what we do and revisit the topic. We're pretty sure someone will write more about us, but we don't claim to know who specifically will define our market, though we do know it will customers that make or break us.