Conversation with Visible Technologies VP Marketing Blake Cahill

The products that Visible Technologies (VT) make help companies track their reputation online. The company recently picked up an additional $12M in Series B funding -- read the news on Venture Beat. I recently worked with a company who appeared to be "joining the conversation" incorrectly by paying for comments on blogs. Today, one slip-up and the blogo' will be all over the goof. 

I had an opportunity to chat with Visible Technologies Marketing VP Blake Cahill about their tools and my notes are below. The Visible Technologies product suite includes TruView and TruCast. TruCast launched earlier this year and helps clients to "monitor, analyze and measure" the chatter about a product or service across the Web.

The company founders were mainly search engine optimization and marketing experts and saw a need for companies to track what's being said about them online. They boast managing the online reputations for six billionaires along with the companies mentioned below.

I asked Blake about the differences between VT's products and those of competitor Buzz Logic. He said that the biggest difference is VT focuses on very large Fortune 500 companies whereas Buzz Logic focuses on companies of all sizes. Some of Visible Technologies clients include: a division of Microsoft, a Fortune 25 computer manufacturer in Texas, one of the Big 3 automakers and they are nearing 20 clients at the enterprise level.

The tools analyze what is being said about a given term across the Web and can decide whether it's positive or negative. One of their top features is the workflow process - that is the ability to have certain terms go to specific people (i.e. the Nobitsu 4500 routes to Molly, the Nobitsu 8700b routes to John). They offer their clients a response library so that it makes it easier for a client to respond. Frankly while this might appear as a good thing, it could make replies seem robotic if the client uses it for full replies.

Not only can you manage your own corporate reputation, but you can track your competition as well. What I have learned over the past decade is that this is something that isn't done enough. It's just as important and can teach you valuable lessons on what to do and not do.

One of their features which really intrigued me is the ability for the client to reply directly to the blogger creating a comment automatically using the VT system. See the screenshots below for an example. Frankly I have no idea how they could automatically post a comment to a blog without it appearing as spam and how they could understand all of the different posting systems, but I assume they have it all figured out. Not sure how I would react if I knew someone was commenting off-site... does that person really want to join my conversation or just pop in a PR reply? This is really more of an issue for the client than for VT directly.

The company CEO is in NYC and the balance of the team is in Seattle with about 90% of the team made up of technologists. The current fees range from $15-25k monthly which is a small price to pay for good buzz monitoring.

Whether you use free services such as Google Alerts/Technorati or paid services such as Visible Technologies or Buzz Logic, one thing is clear - you should be monitoring your brand or service at all times.

Interface screenshot: