Below is Part 2 of a recent interview with Bhupendra Khanal, the architect behind Buzzom—a leading social marketing and Twitter account management tool. Mr. Khanal offered to share his time with Eric Rudolf, a career Internet Marketing professional and owner of THEsmallCOMPANYBLOG.
Please follow this link to access Part 1 of this Interview.
THE INTERVIEW: QUESTIONS 6 THRU 10
Eric: For marketing analytics “nerds” like me, the graphical reporting functions offered in your Buzzom Premium Subscription are really what make your system an attractive option for me. What prompted you to put so much time and effort into the analytics side of your system?
Bhupendra: Like you, I am also a “numbers” person, as well as a Marketing Analyst. I served Fair Isaac (now FICO) as a Consultant for Marketing Analytics early in my career, and have deep roots playing with numbers, charts and figures. Also, my colleague Sweta is a statistician and an analytics reporting specialist.
The point is, we both believe strongly in Analytics and proper reporting, and have built the Buzzom system for people like us. But you have not seen the best from us yet. To date, we have implemented only about 10% of the analytics functionality that we believe needs to be offered in Buzzom. You will see some wonderful work going ahead!
Eric: It seems like every time I log in, Twitter is trying to offer users another new feature or function. Is there any overlap between these features and what Buzzom offers? And if so, do you see the developers at Twitter as direct competitors?
Bhupendra: Twitter is definitely a competitor. They are constantly pushing to make sure their ecosystem flourishes, and this works in our favor. However, they also work very hard to make sure people stay on their site . . . which is obviously not as good for us. This is a race we are both running, but there is a paradox: sometimes, we help each other out!
Most people don’t realize this, but the concept of “Lists” was first introduced in Buzzom Desktop. At the time we allowed people to create groups to follow, without actually following the people within the group. But eventually, this feature was copied by TweetDeck, and ultimately by Twitter.
If Twitter eventually emulates one of our features, we have two choices: Buzzom can either develop a new feature (i.e. innovate), or introduce a feature for competing social network (i.e. hit back). It’s actually a great deal of fun to compete with such a big player, and it is definitely not new for us. In terms of direct competitors, Buzzom competes with Twitter, TweetDeck and Hootsuite. Our URL shortener competes with Bit.ly, Google (goo.gl), and Facebook (fb.me). Innovation and hard work keeps us moving, and our aim is to make it hard for the developers at Twitter to catch us.
Eric: From a marketing perspective, how does Buzzom plan to win the battle against other social networking tools that make outrageous claims like “get 10,000 followers per week” and “make $5,000 per month on Twitter?”
Bhupendra: I see Buzzom competing with Hootsuite, Objective Marketer, SocialOomph, TweetDeck, Seismic, and so on. But we do not compete, nor do we attempt to compete, with tools that sell followers for money.
Buzzom does not promote spam of any kind, and we are completely against this kind of aggressive, “mass follow” behaviour. Our clients and Twitter’s public timeline need to be healthy, and all follows should be meaningful and targeted. Buzzom is a highly specialized tool that focuses on being three things: clean, useful and productive.
Eric: Are there any upcoming features or functions you would like to give our readers a sneak preview of?
Bhupendra: We plan to release a large number of features targeted at normal users—both marketers and non-marketers who are more along the lines of “pure” Twitter users. Our goal is to make Twitter a fun place, and we will eventually be using our expertise in building social games to bring some really exciting features. But your readers will need to wait a few more weeks to find out what those features are! And as I mentioned previously, Buzzom Premium Edition will regularly be enhanced with improved reporting and analytics, as well as multi-account support.
Eric: What is the best way for people to get a feel for what Buzzom offers?
Bhupendra: If your readers register for Buzzom Premium for just one month, I am positive they won’t go anywhere else. For professional marketers, our feature set simply cannot be beat—and Buzzom’s account and tweet tracking is among the best in the market. And there are, of course, a LOT more features to choose from. The fact is, Buzzom Premium is a complete Twitter solution for business-related users, at a fraction of the cost of other systems.
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