mBlast is a marketing tool that’s dawned in a new era of online media, where social voices rule and influencers are no longer easily identified as journalists and celebrities.  Addressing the changing needs of today’s marketers, mBlast launched a new tool called mpact about 11 weeks ago, with fancy algorithms that convert web-scouring into readable reports for brands, their advertising agencies, and board room meetings.

But bringing the product to fruition, and to scale, was a long and arduous journey.  mBlast CEO Gary Lee recognized early on that his game-changing product would need a great deal of attention from the conceptual stage, towards designing an infrastructure to handle massive amounts of data quickly and accurately.  The two primary concerns in building mpact to scale revolved around data analysis, speed and searchability.

“We had a big issue with scale when building mpact, as we track a lot of things.  We spent several months last year determining how this model could be built to scale,” Lee tells me during an interview.  “We had to go beyond traditional database technology, just because of the scale we were working with.  We realized off-the-shelf databases from many of the vendors out here just wouldn’t work.  We had to have a search engine on top of that database for clients, to search and find any keyword to match against all the data out there.”

That data includes Twitter tweets, Facebook updates, blog publications and their comments.  From there, mBlast identifies who’s saying what, based on a user’s keyword needs.  What’s new to the industry is measuring these voices, determining the impact of each individual voice.  It’s like a page rank for individual social media users, incorporating their activity from across the web, as well as their social reach, areas of repeated discussion and how their message spreads across the web.

Social media metrics has been gaining steam for a little while now, though it still has a ways to go.  As more consumer, and even B2B data is being collected, there’s more ways of analyzing the information for various purposes.  When it comes to the marketing industry, it’s a matter of supplementing the creativity advertisers are known for with disciplined scientific methods, research and statistics.

The process is also following similar patterns as many cloud companies, in creating a centralized platform that crunches data and delivers reports on-demand.  Citrusleaf is an industry newbie, putting forth new ways of sifting through data.  As more companies find ways to incorporate more data into their business needs and customer relations, more cloud services and marketing tools will emerge from these trends.

“This is a fast-moving space we’re in.  It’s fun, but also challenging,” Lee continues.  “We use our own tools to keep up with topics we care about in the market, and every day we’re asking questions and plotting where the market is going.  We’re at the forefront of technology in this area, and our goal is to stay in front of the market, talk to as many smart people as we can, and have conversations about this market, helping it evolve into something even more strong.”