CityGrid Media buys BuzzLabs to support SME social media monitoring

IAC’s local advertising network CityGrid Media has purchased social media monitoring start-up BuzzLabs in a bid to enable small-and-medium businesses to analyse customer sentiment more effectively.

IAC, which operates a range of websites including Ask.com and Match.com, did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but was the primary backer and a partner of the two-year-old Seattle-based firm, which was set up by former Microsoft employees, Philip Lee and Dou Shen.

Jay Herratti, CityGrid Media’s chief executive, said: "By adding BuzzLabs to the CityGrid offering, we are able to provide our publishers with relevant, real-time content and new local data that consumers now rely on to make their decisions."

BuzzLabs’ offering includes sentiment analysis tools, which identify key phrases in online content to determine whether it is positive, negative or neutral. It also consists of a dashboard to enable users to view social media activity from a single location.

Over the next three to six months, the aim is to integrate the software with CityGrid’s Citysearch local listings and advertising service to enable the firm to aggregate and analyse user-generated content in order to provide publishers and merchants with customer sentiment and trend data.

According to TechCrunch, CityGrid Media also intends to integrate the BuzzLabs dashboard with its Media Ad Center to provide local advertisers with tools to manage their online reputations more effectively themselves.