http://www.beet.tv/2009/02/for-small-blogs-nielsens-buzzmetrics-could-turn-social-influence-into-dollars.html

Small blogs with an audience of 10,000 to 20,000 viewers might have a difficult time selling advertising, but advertisers should sure be listening to what they're saying, according to Jon Gibs, VP of Media Analytics at Nielsen Online. Nielsen's BuzzMetrics services can help turn the collective influence of the blogosphere and other social media channels into data similar to measurements for an ad campaign.
"So we believe that audience metrics for smaller, social media sites, for smaller blogs--10,00, 20,000 people--we shouldn't care that much about unique audience, we should care about influence," he told Andy in this interview. "We should care about how influential that person's voice is in the overall marketplace. We think that within social media you have this core of influencers, [and] that we can quantify those influencers through a Buzzmetrics data set. And we can talk about how those people are influencing other people's behavior. So we think that's really the core element for social media measurement."
The next part of the challenge is finding out who what is creating buzz and who the audience listening to that buzz is, according to Gibs. Then "we can produce the number of GRPs that are produced by social media, the number of its demographic reach, things like that, in a very similar way that you would think about advertising campaign measurement," he says.
You can see the first segment of Andy's interview with Gibs here.
--Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer