What if I told you there is a social media tool that gives you the ability to comb millions of blogs in order to identify the right blogger for your outreach campaign? What if I told you the same tool allows a deep dive into your competitor’s blogs? What if I told you this tool also allows for tracking and measurement against a blog campaign or defined article?

But wait - there’s more!

Social media and content professionals can choose from a growing list of monitoring and intelligence tools. There are a million different dashboards. And within them are a seemingly endless array of metrics. It’s sort of like those new touchscreen soda dispensers (or “pop” dispensers if you live anywhere between Pittsburgh and Seattle). You’re presented with a mind-boggling amount of options - but only a few of the flavors really matter.

Getting a feel for base metrics is important because pre-, during- and post-analytical assessment is essential to the optimization of budget and campaign. We all know that.

But much like nickel bottles of Coke and me wearing jeans with a 32-inch waist, another essential campaign element seems to be a thing of the past. I’m talking about the “discovery phase.”

The discovery phase should be a foregone conclusion. However, nothing could be further from the truth. I see more agencies, social media firms and their niche counterparts diving into campaigns without a lick of sense or any effort to determine goals and assessments. Of course it should be a no-brainer that you sit down with your client and actually asked what they anticipate out of the campaign. It is your responsibility as a professional to seek the highest level of granularity prior to spending dime one on an initiative that is displayed to the primary public audience.

<steps down off of soapbox> Forgive the rant. But nothing surprises me more during a postmortem than learning the client and their competitors were not thoroughly vetted to determine directives. </steps down off of soapbox> 

Among the many responsibilities is to actively seek out and research the future of social media applications and processes. This brings me to an article I wrote some time ago regarding blogger outreach when IBM put together a fantastic program in partnership with Brian Kramer’s (send me a T-shirt) “Pure Matter.” After I wrote that article I was contacted by a company called Grouphigh.com - they claimed at the time that they were in the process of cracking the Holy Grail by documenting, ranking and developing algorithms to help agencies find the appropriate bloggers for their campaign needs.

It’s safe to say the tool was probably very good even then. It is equally safe to say I probably had my head in my ass and couldn't get around to contacting them. Fortunately our paths crossed again recently.

GroupHigh.com is a blogger outreach and research tool. However, in my personal opinion, it is far more than that. Like with many applications, you start organizing your data as you construct "lists." Within these lists you can import the URLs of bloggers you follow or refer to. From there comes a sea of data:

• Contact information
• Blogger location
• Associated/Guest bloggers
• Social graphs
• Internet rankings
• Facebook rankings
• Twitter rankings
• Blog data/topics
• MOZ rankings
• Customizable data for sorting

…and much more.

GroupHigh follows the lead of other great applications by offering multiple ways to perform the same function. Depending on how you use the tool, there are different options for performing tasks such as:

• Search by generalized topic
• Search by keyword with an blog posts
• Search by blogger
• Search within social graph
• Search within a timeframe
• Search within a geographical location

...and much more.

Only a week ago Group High added the additional services of monitoring and tracking. From here you can basically do what you would anticipate, monitor specific blog posts and apply tracking to the bloggers that writer may be working with. You can utilize this as a very robust competitive analysis tool. Exactly what you need in a constantly evolving industry that is subject to change based upon competitive strategies. 

I think this is a tool you should consider if you're an advertising agency, large brand, or social media firm. Be aware this is not a baseline tool you can subscribe to for a mere 10 bucks a month. On the other hand, it’s no Radian6 either. But unlike many tools that provide only intellectual benefits, GroupHigh provides the kind of data we can sell back to our clients. I say with a great deal of confidence that my previous post regarding the social competitive analysis would have gone exponentially faster if I had access to this tool.

So are you doing blogger outreach? If so how are you finding your bloggers? Would a tool like this be beneficial to you? Leave your thoughts. Or better yet, contact GroupHigh so you can kick the tires for yourself.

I hope they send me a free T-shirt (XL black).