Andiamo! - Social Media Marketing Blog

What The New Forrester Brand Wave Report Says

Forrester's Brand Wave report just came out. Forrester publishes this report annually, and this year they rated half a dozen select 'enterprise-focused' social media analysis vendors (they decided to call it 'Listening Platforms' this year).

The top 2 highlights?

• Our category is rapidly evolving from a pure metrics-driven environment to one where vendors help deliver actionable consumer insights, especially leveraging consumer sentiment.
• Sentiment analysis and influencer identification are key to understanding conversation impact and customer engagement. Most of the vendors reviewed needed improvement in these areas, if they offered them at all.

Although we were not included in Forrester's report this year, the good news is that at Andiamo Systems, we do provide sentiment analysis as well as influencer rating and identification within our platform. We believe this benefits marketers by allowing them to determine and act on the most impactful and important conversations around their brands and industry.

Are there other areas of social media analysis that you think should be focused on more? Let us know!

New Agency Product!

In response to really great customer requests and feedback into our leading Social Media Analysis application, we recently launched our Agency product. Our new offering provides agency partners a complete, agency-branded solution allowing them to increase new business and grow existing billings by adding social media as an integral part of their agency offering. Here's some of the features & benefits:

• Agency branding - just upload your logo and it will replace the Andiamo logo throughout the application and on the downloadable reports, so your brand is the one featured, not ours.
• Custom sub-domain - Throughout the application, starting with the login page URL, all pages carry your brand with no mention of Andiamo Systems. It’s up to you whether to mention us or not.
• Advanced account administration - Agencies get an additional area where they can add, manage and delete accounts, as well as assign log-in access to clients.
• High-touch support - We’re all in this new realm together and we want you to look your best. So we work with you to set up new clients, and add or edit campaigns and take on any support you’ll need.
• 90-day plan - We work hand-in-hand with you to make sure projects get started off right, including scoping requirements, refining campaigns terms, setting expectations, and developing presentations
  and findings.

So agencies, check us out! If you're interested and want more information including a demo, contact us!

Andiamo Upgrade!

After our initial launch last winter, we've been in contact with lots of our customers about the improvements they'd like to see. And in response to their excellent suggestions, last week we launched an upgrade with some exciting new enhancements designed to help our customers get the most from Andiamo Systems' social media measurement services. Here are the highlights!                            

Improved sexy interface & reporting            

The first thing you'll notice upon logging in is a much more intuitive and attractive interface. But hey, what good are looks alone? Here's just some of the improvements you'll see:   

• Easy 1-2-3 steps to to run your reports. First, select your dates by either 'date range' or specific time periods such as 'past week', 'past month' and more. Second, select the brands you wish to view. Third, select the report format & sources - user generated media (UGM), mainstream media (MSM) or both. Then hit 'refresh' and voila! You have a custom report.
• You can now filter your reports to show only UGM, MSM or all sources, allowing you to instantly view the information most important to you.
• New PDF report option for download.
• Improved sentiment reporting. We now suppress all 'neutral' mentions, making it easier to view positive and negative opinion trends.

Email summary reports & customized email notifications                           

We're all busy. So remembering to log-in regularly can be a real challenge. Well, now you can subscribe to have summary reports emailed directly to you, and anyone else you wish to receive them. Choose from weekly and monthly options.                

You can also select custom settings  to receive email notifications each time a specific Mention meets your criteria. You can select by almost any combination of speaker influence level, relevance and sentiment. Now you'll never miss an important  Mention! This is very helpful for you corporate communications and PR folks or anyone else who monitors brand reputation.      

Feedback loop for your comments               

We strive to deliver the most accurate results to our customers. But if you disagree with any of our ratings, just click the 'Feedback' link and let us know the what you think. We'll review it and get back to you in a jiffy.       

We have a complete Product Tour on our website, feel free to check it out!

Check Out 'Search Engine Marketing Journal'

We all know how powerful search engine marketing (SEM) is to drive brand awareness and more importantly leads and sales. A significant amount of Andiamo Systems' marketing budget is allocated to Google Adwords and to a lesser extent Yahoo! and MSN.

And increasingly, the realization of the tight connection between SEM and social media is becoming more obvious. For some brands and industries there are as many first page search engine results that are from blogs, forums and social networks as there are from traditional mainstream media. That's largely because search engines eat blogs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They are updated frequently, have lots of content and are typically well-formatted for easy SE crawling. So you need to make sure you have an understanding of how SEM can affect your business.

Which leads me to the Search Engine Marketing Journal (SEMJ). SEMJ is the first printed journal dedicated to the advancement of search engine marketing. What? A print pub about online marketing? Yep. Don't worry, they also have a great website. It is unique in that it is a peer-reviewed journal where anyone is free to contribute. All papers are screen by a team of editors (disclosure: I am Senior Editor) to ensure that the quality is top-notch, relevant and actionable for businesspeople to use.

These guys are leveraging the power of user-generated content to bring continually updated, and fresh information, always showing a unique perspective. Check them out!

Quick Tip to View Your Mention Count

Andiamo Systems provides 8 different reports to get a full understanding of the social media around your brands. And most reports are able to be viewed in various formats as well as downloaded to .CSV, XML or .TXT. That said, we've received a few questions about how to quickly get a very basic bit of information - "How do I quickly see a count summary of my mentions by week or month?"

Here's the best way to get this:

• First, select the 'Trends' report from the left navigation. It defaults to a daily line graph:

1. Then, select the date range you want
2. From the format drop down list, select 'Vertical Bar'
3. Select either weekly or monthly from the 'Show By' menu

And voilå:

You can mouse over any of the bars to get the exact count for that time period, and as always you can  click through to view all your mentions for that time period as well.

Play around with the different formats in the reports, you may find a format that better fits your needs than the defaults!

 

Andiamo Systems is Live!

OK, after more than a year and a half of hard-core development, lots of sweat and not much sleep we have launched our word-of-mouth meaurement and brand monitoring application! Pretty exciting news, and already we have dozens of clients including VerticalResponse (my wife's award-winning company)  NetBooks, eWinery Solutions, Robert Mondavi Winery, Leverage Software and more.

Why do they and may others use us? Because CONSUMERS RULE. In fact, 75% of consumers state that 'Recommendations from someone like me' is the #1 influencer of purchase. All of us talk to each other about the best hotels & spas; our favorite wines & restaurants; what's the best plasma TV, etc, etc. We drive brand perception, purchase intent and market value.  And smart businesses know they need to listen. 

So enough shameless self-promotion! Come on over, check us out and see if we're for you!

We're live!

Hi everyone

On Tuesday we launched the Andiamo Systems website - Yea! And thanks to our team that got it done. Go check it out and let us know what you think. Our goal at Andiamo is #1) to provide easy to understand, well-supported, affordable brand monitoring and word-of-mouth measurement so our clients can be relevant to consumers and increase their sales & profits and #2) with our launch, also have a website (as well as all other customer touch point materials) that conveys our offering in a clear, friendly format.

During our initial launch, we are accepting new customers and Free Trials on a reservation basis, only so we can ensure the highest quality service for everyone. If you are interested, hit our site and sign up!

And please, let us know what you think! With your help we can build the best service out there!

Not Just Your Ordinary Marketing Blog (hopefully)

Hi and welcome to the Andiamo Word Of Mouth Blog. My name is John Hingley, founder of Andiamo Systems and author of this blog. What my soon-to-be-launched company will provide is an easy, affordable, on-demand way for businesses to discover the who, what, why and where surrounding word of mouth and mainstream media 'buzz' about their businesses and brands and their competitors brands. The industry calls it Brand Monitoring.

With increased knowledge comes improved ROI. No information overload, we'll focus on the most actionable intelligence for our customers...all killer, no filler!

Anyway, back to the blog: what this blog hopes to achieve is to create a forum chock full of helpful thoughts, ideas and WOM examples to help business people more effectively understand and use word of mouth to grow their business. And while we are revving up and getting ready to launch Andiamo Systems, I'll probably chat a bit about the successes and screw-ups that every start-up experiences along the way...

So check in often, and please feel free to contribute by commenting on our posts and other readers comments.

Cheers!