We had a terrific launch with some good coverage at Mashable(Thanks Jennifer), TechCrunch, Louis Gray, Chris Brogan, Nate Ritter, Belinda Ang, Scott Schnaars and a host of others.

• We had over 6583 tweets covering BuzzGain during the two days of our constant press coverage.
• We had an 892% increase in registered users, and a 17% conversion rate to customers willing to pay for the service.
• Over 35 blogs, news sites and social media influencers covered our story in 27 unique websites

So what are the top 3 things to fix in our product:

1. More intuitive and easier to setup campaigns: Over 28% of people had problems with setting up a campaign (shame on us). Since many folks were not able to view the video, they used quotes as in “Keyword”, or ‘Keywords’. Yet others used to many keywords (over 7 makes the system slow) and others would use generic keywords such as video or games etc. to get too many unrelated results. To setup a campaign in BuzzGain, you need just a Campaign name and a set of keywords separated by comma. As in SocialText, Wiki, Ross Mayfield . This will look for results with any one of these keywords. For excluding some keywords we go to point #2.

2. Support for boolean operators such as AND, NOT and OR in our campaign management. It was important for most folks to be able to have some support for keywords to supress or to have a more sophisticated campaign keyword list. Essentially to ask for SocialText and Wiki but NOT Ross Mayfield.

3. More intuitive user experience overall: This was split down the middle. Either users LOVED the UI or hated it. There are several things we can do to make the overall experience more intuitive which we will roll out in the next few weeks. This includes a guided wizard like experience and easy to understand icons.

Thank you for all the feedback and the requests. Brian and I truly appreciate all the feedback, please keep them coming either via email (mukund at buzzgain dot com) or via the support pages.

]]> http://news.buzzgain.com/top-3-things-we-have-to-fix-in-buzzgain-feedback-from-153-early-adopters/feed/ 1 http://news.buzzgain.com/the-blogging-platform-of-choice-for-main-stream-media/ http://news.buzzgain.com/the-blogging-platform-of-choice-for-main-stream-media/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:24:05 +0000 Mukund http://news.buzzgain.com/?p=22

Most people compare blog sites and bloggers to main stream media. I am not sure I agree 100%, but lets go with that assumption. The top 20 US newspapers, or main stream media newspapers with the largest circulation currently (and also mostly by website statistics) are listed below and their blogs.

Side note: In the top 20 newspapers worldwide, USA Today does not appear in the top 15, so keep that in mind. But on the flip side, these are print circulation numbers NOT web traffic.

Movable Type and Wordpress rule the roost at 30% and 25%. Typepad (Also owned by Six Apart) if included will clearly put Six Apart at #1 for the top 20 blogs.

In the top 100 newspapers in the US, Six Apart is still #1 at 37% marketshare to 28% for Wordpress.

First some interesting numbers on newspapers and blogs.

1. We currently track about 12,393 world wide main stream news sources of which 8848 are newspapers. Of our newspaper sources, 81% have blogs written by their staff or columnists.

2. The average number of bloggers in the top 20 newspapers is 17and the average number of blogs is 29.

3. Outside the US, the % of blogs with newspapers drops a from a dramatic 81% to 37%. (Note: this is English language newspapers only).

What do I take away from this:

1. If 81% of newspapers worldwide have blogs, you have a huge target rich set of folks who are looking for new content, interesting ideas and new companies. You can go beyond Walt Mossberg and Sarah Lacy folks. It will yield you good results.

2. Take a look at Movable type 4.2 release notes from my friend Anil. Read it carefully and you’ll see community capability and social networks. I was especially impressed with the small feature ranking and rating. Why? We have to evolve from a Alexa site visits and pageviews set of metrics to engagement as a measure for measuring media (all media, social and otherwise).

3. If you are targeting newspapers outside the US, as part of your PR launch, realize most editors & journalists will still prefer the email and phone followed by a personal pitch (as in face to face). Schedule your time for those appropriately.

Questions:

1. Anyone has experience with Pluck which is used by USA Today? What’s your impression?

2. As part of your effort do you still “segregate” main stream media and social media targets? Why?

P.S. If you are further interested in reading about the topic of main stream media in general, I’d highly recommend Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0 Blog.