FAQ
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General Questions
Who are you guys?
How is Andiamo different from blog search engines & Google Alerts?
Can conventional search engines or blog search engines provide the same information as Andiamo?
What is Word of Mouth Marketing?
What is Brand Monitoring & Word of Mouth Measurement?
Why is this important?
What can I do with the information Andiamo provides?
What if I'm not generating much buzz?
What's a blog?
What's splog?
Reports & Reporting
How often do you update your information?
What sources do you monitor?
Are all information sources and authors treated equally?
What is a Mention?
What information do you provide?
What is the Authority rating?
What is the Sentiment rating?
What is the Relevance rating?
What is the Reach rating?
How do you keep splogs out of your reporting?
Are all blogs created equally?
What is the Channel?
What does the Share of Voice report mean?
What is a Source?
Do you deliver reports going back in time, before I signed up for the service?
How can I sign up for email reports?
How can I unsubscribe or change my email report preferences?
Campaign Management
What is a Campaign?
How many brands should I put in a Campaign?
Do I need to enter all possible spellings of a Brand when I enter it?
Can I swap out Brands within a Campaign?
What if I want to delete a Brand?
How can I sign up for multiple accounts; your tool tells me I can only have one account per email address?
Billing
How much does your service cost?
Why is my current bill more/less than last month?
Does it cost more to add a new Campaign?
Do you charge at the beginning of each month?
Can I pay by credit card?
General Questions
Q. Who are you guys?
A. Andiamo Systems is a software-as-service technology company devoted to providing businesses the most timely, relevant, and actionable business intelligence possible, so they can in turn make more well-informed decisions regarding company strategy, product positioning, advertising and marketing messaging, and sales strategies.
We do this by mining blogs, message boards, forums, social networks, and mainstream media to report on consumer perceptions and attitudes on our customers businesses, brands, products, services, and competitors.
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Q. How is Andiamo different from blog search engines, Google Alerts and the rest?
A. We differ significantly from these services, which contain a significant amount of splog, meaning they leave it to you to sift through endless irrelevant and garbage data. Further, they do not determine sentiment, relevancy, or authority of the speaker and do not provide this information trending over time. The time savings and directional insight our reporting provides far exceeds the capabilities of blog search engines.
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Q. Can conventional search engines or blog search engines provide the same information as Andiamo?
A. No. Conventional search engines are designed to answer general or vertical content questions. We designed Andiamo Systems to identify in real-time and longer-term trending who is most relevant, authoritative, and influential to your brands, and whether consumer opinion is trending more positive or negative over time. These services take significant resources and skills to develop and maintain.
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Q. What is Word of Mouth Marketing?
A. The art of creating genuine customer enthusiasm, amplifying it, and sharing it with future fans.
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Q. What is Brand Monitoring?
A. According to Forrester Research, "the ongoing analysis of mainstream media and consumer-generated media to identify trends relevant to a company's marketing activities and competitive landscape."
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Q. Why is brand monitoring important?
A. These days, companies are no longer in control of their brands. Consumers are. In fact, over 3/4 of consumers rate word of mouth as the #1 influencer of their purchase decision. With the advent of social media, and the ease at which consumers can and are actively discussing their likes, dislikes and desires about products and brands, businesses have to listen, learn and take action in order to be relevant and competitive.
For instance, if someone posts a highly negative comment about your business on a blog, it has the potential of reaching thousands, if not millions more consumers in a very short amount of time. Needless to say, this can have a huge impact on the brand and business. If you are aware of this immediately, you can take action: contact the blogger if facts are in error, post a comment on the blog stating your side of the story or whether you are working on a resolution, etc. Immediate response is important in maintaining your reputation.
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Q. What can I do with the information Andiamo provides?
A. Grow your business. Discover exactly who are the biggest Influencers of discussion about your brands, and engage them; see if (and why) you are gaining or losing share-of-voice versus your competitive set; discover, instantly, what consumers - especially Influencers - think about your brands or business; craft highly-relevant marketing and advertising messages; create products or services with features consumers really want; discover if consumers are getting ready to defect from you. And win them back.
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Q. What if I'm not generating much buzz?
A. Well, sometimes no news can be good news. It all depends on your strategy and business type to a degree. And it's not only the level of buzz you are generating; it is that any single mention can significantly influence consumer perception about your brand.
The best way to organically generate word-of-mouth discussion about your business is to provide remarkable customer service, products, services, and marketing messages.
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Q. What's a blog?
A. A blog, short for weblog, is a website consisting of articles, typically written in a conversational manner and often geared to promoting active discussion between the blog author and his/her readers.
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Q. What's splog?
A. Long story short, splog is the spam of the blogosphere. Irrelevant, disreputable, or stolen content posted to a blog site in order to increase the PageRank of the splogger affiliated website and increase advertising impressions. Andiamo invests significant resources to identify and eliminate splog data from our reporting.
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Reports & Reporting
Q. How often do you update your information?
A. Continuously. Since we deliver a high degree of accuracy and intelligence around the information, it does take a little time to analyze and report on. We strive for a maximum 24-hour latency but are typically much closer to real time.
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Q. What sources do you monitor?
A. We believe it is necessary to monitor as may different sources as possible to give you a complete view of consumer perceptions. So in addition to millions of blogs, we actively monitor forums, message boards, review sites, social networks like Twitter and YouTube, online news and magazines and more.
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Q. Are all information sources and authors treated equally?
A. Absolutely not. We use a combination of technology and human review to score each and every individual information source based on their authority, or knowledge of, the subject at hand. We also score information sources based on audience and overall reach. In addition, we deliver the sentiment rating of the article. This means the positive or negative tone of the article as it pertains to the brand you are tracking. These factors help us provide our customers with the most relevant information, especially the key Influencers of conversations around their business.
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Q. What is a Mention?
A. A "Mention" is the occurrence of one or more of your tracked brands within an article - a blog post or comment, a video, a "Tweet" on Twitter, a review or newspaper article.
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Q. What information do you provide?
A. Each Mention includes 9 pieces of important information about the brands you are tracking: the Brand, Source name, Timestamp, a short snippet of the article, the positive or negative sentiment of the article, a 1-100 rating of the Speaker Influence, and a 1-100 rating of the degree of relevance the article has to your brand. If you mouse over the Speaker Influence score, you'll also see 1-5 values for the relative reach and authority of the source.
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Q. What is the Authority rating?
A. You can view the Authority rating by mousing over the Speaker Influence score. Authority is determined by a proprietary algorithm that considers a combination of factors including the number and quality of other sites that link to the site, the primary focus of the site, and the frequency of updates. The Authority rating is a 1-5 score, with 5 being the highest level of Authority or expertise.
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Q. What is the Sentiment rating?
A. Sentiment is the opinion or attitude of the article pertaining to the brand in question. We determine sentiment by a combination of natural language processing technology and human review. We employ a 3-point rating system - Positive, Negative or Neutral.
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Q. What is the Relevance rating?
A. Relevance refers to the degree that the article pertains to the brand in question. Relevance is scored on a scale of 1-100 with 100 being the highest degree of relevance. For instance, if the brand is the main subject of the article, the relevance will be 100. On the other hand, if the article merely mentions the brand in a minor, passing way the relevance would be much lower depending on the exact article and brand in question.
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Q. What is the Reach rating?
A. You can view the Reach rating by mousing over the Speaker Influence score. Reach is a relative audience size of the site. Reach is scored on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest possible audience size of the site. We determine reach by considering a variety of factors, with the primary factor being overall site traffic.
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Q. How do you keep splogs out of your reporting?
A. We have advanced technology that we have invested substantial brain cells and financial resources to develop. And we continuously develop more advanced technology to eliminate irrelevant articles and posts from our reporting. Plus, we have actual human beings that review results and manually delete splog where necessary.
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Q. Are all blogs created equally?
A. No, and we are careful to treat each blog and blogger individually, assigning Speaker Influence, Authority and Reach scores specific to each blog. And it's not just blogs that get this treatment - we assign source-specific scores and ratings to each and every review site, social network, forum, or any other site we capture information from.
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Q. What is the Channel?
A. The Channel is the type of media the in which the Mention occurred and we categorize them by user-generated media (UGM) which includes social networks, review sites, personal blogs, and forums; and mainstream media (MSM) which includes news, magazine, and trade sites.
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Q. What does the Share of Voice report mean?
A. The Share of Voice report shows you how much buzz, or market awareness, your tracked brands have in relation to each other. Use this report to track the percentage of total buzz your brand is achieving versus the competitive brands you are tracking.
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Q. What is a Source?
A. The Source is the name of the website - blog, message board, forum, opinion site, social network, trade, newspaper, or review site - where mentions occur.
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Q. Do you deliver reports going back in time?
A. Currently, we begin delivering reports to you as of the date you signed up for our service, and are not providing retroactive information as a service. If you need a custom solution please contact us.
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Q. How do I sign up for email reports?
A. Go to the left hand navigation bar within your reporting. The last item is called Get Email Reports. Just click on it, and you can quickly subscribe to daily, weekly and monthly summary reports. They tell you the number of number of mentions per brand, the number and percentage generated by user generated media and mainstream media, and the number and percentage that have positive or negative sentiment.
You can also sign up for email notifications, where you can customize settings that trigger emails delivered to you based on specific sentiment, influence, and relevance values.
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Q. How do I unsubscribe or change my email report preferences?
A. Simply go to the My Account tab. Select "scheduled emails" and make any adjustments you want. Your new preferences will take effect immediately.
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Campaign Management
Q. What is a Campaign?
A. A Campaign contains one or more brands that you want to track. You can have as many Campaigns in your account as you like, which makes it easy to organize your brands into logical groups if necessary.
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Q. How many brands should I put in a Campaign?
A. As many as you want, although the reporting is more clear when you keep the number of brands at 4-5. Beyond that many brands, most of our clients find that creating additional Campaigns is the best approach. It helps keep the graphs and charts easier to understand.
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Q. Do I need to know all possible spellings of a Brand I want to track?
A. If you know of common misspells or abbreviations, please let us know. We will also review your brands and enter additional abbreviations and misspells for you, at no additional charge.
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Q. Can I swap out Brands within a Campaign?
A. Yes. Just fill out the "Edit Campaign" form under the .Campaign. tab. Your request will be sent to one of our Client Relations Specialists for processing.
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Q. What if I want to delete a Brand?
A. You can delete a Brand at any time, although please be aware that your reporting for that Brand will immediately stop. If you later decide to add that Brand back to a Campaign, you will not have any reporting for it during the time it was absent from your Campaign. Just fill out the "Edit Campaign" form under the "Campaign" tab. Your request will be sent to one of our Client Relations Specialists for processing.
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Q. How can I sign up for multiple accounts; your tool tells me I can only have one account per email address?
A. You are right, each account is tied to a unique email address. You can set up as many individual campaigns as you like within one account. If you require more assistance in this area, please contact us.
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Billing
Q. How much does your service cost?
A. Our service is priced according to the number of net Mentions your Brands generate in the course of a month. We always remove all splog and irrelevant data such as false matches, so you only pay for net, clean, completely rated Mentions. We ask for a 12-month minimum commitment, as social media measurement is a long-term strategy. We constantly monitor our clients usage levels to ensure we are providing the most affordable solution for each of our clients.
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Q. Why is my current bill more/less than last month?
A. Your monthly charge will vary depending on the number of Mentions you generate each month. We strive to always provide you the most affordable and flexible plan at all times.
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Q. Does it cost more to add a new Campaign?
A. Nope, we only charge by the net amount of Mentions each billing cycle. So add as many Campaigns as you like!
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Q. Do you charge at the beginning of each month?
A. We invoice each month in advance of activity, on a net 30 basis.
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Q. Can I pay by credit card?
A. If you require credit card payment, please discuss with our Client Relations Specialists or your Account Manager.
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