Log Savvy is an analytics company based in Berkeley, CA that tracks behavior across social networks. The company’s goal is to understand online community dynamics and pinpoint influential users. These users are hubs of activity but do not necessarily spend the most time and money on the social network.
Identifying users that radiate activity requires examining behavioral data for each individual as well as the resulting behavior of the people connected to them. It sounds easy, but as the size of a community grows, the number crunching increases exponentially. Log Savvy manages the data load by pre-summarizing data before it’s sent to the query engine and using machine clusters for processing.
Log Savvy charges a monthly fee for its service, which varies by data volume and how often a customer wants reports. For a social network with five to ten million users, Log Savvy says it costs on average $10,000 to set up and $a month ongoing.
Mark Searle, Log Savvy’s CEO, launched an analytics company in 2000 that quickly became Adamark, a security analytics company, after 9/11. At the time Searle and a few of his colleagues, who later became founders of Log Savvy, were trying to better understand user behavior online.
Influencers are a prime target for advertisers who are willing to pay a premium to reach them, especially when launching new products. Xfire, a gaming network owned by Viacom, is a client of Log Savvy. Knowing the influencers on Xfire is of great value to Viacom. The media giant targets these key users with offers from its other media properties in the hope that they’ll bring their personal networks along with them.
While the majority of top analytics companies can produce the same influencer results as Log Savvy, they create them via one-off projects that can cost ten times as much, says Searle. Log Savvy’s customers are also users of Log Savvy’s competitors: Visual Sciences, Webture, Omniture, and Google Analytics, all of which turn out to be data sources for Log Savvy.
As Log Savvy continues to prove its ability to identify influencers, we predict one of two things happening. One of the top business analytics companies will buy it, or even better for Log Savvy, one of them will create a directly competitive product. In such a situation, the remaining competitors will need to match this new service to stay competitive, and a bidding war to purchase Log Savvy will begin. Log Savvy just needs to keep proving the unique value of its analytics to make one of these outcomes happen.
