According to John Hingley, CEO at Andiamo Systems, you can. Andiamo, launched in January, targets small to medium-size companies that want to see the results of their social media activities (or just track mentions of their brand). What makes Andiamo stand out from the pack? They’ve made their online buzz monitoring system near real-time, easily accessible, and in a price range most companies can afford.

It’s not the sophisticated linguistics-based text-analysis system you would find from Attensity, but Andiamo’s system is intuitive and easy to use. It puts monitoring blogs and user comments in the hands of the client. As with all social media monitoring systems, Andiamo requires hands on analysis from people inside the company. Most of the junk and repetitive links get filtered out, but since the data has to be “cleaned” it’s a little less real-time than a fully automated system would be.

According to John, “Google Alerts can give you a 3-8 day delay for results and sends out a lot of junk. Andiamo gets 30-40% more hits.” He added, “I believe Andiamo gets 80-85% of what’s on the Web” and it’s getting better with each release. A PR manager from one company I spoke with that was running a test using Andiamo said that he could find many more hits on his brand using Google search. And John is the first to admit that he can’t beat Google’s search algorithms. However, an automated service that finds most of the comments on your brand is a good start.

Andiamo’s best feature is their sentiment ratings. At a quick glance you can see if the overall comments are negative, positive, or neutral. This feature is a great early warning system. And several Andiamo customers have found product, security, and service issues they hadn’t known about previously.

If you’re going to launch a brand on a budget, or you want to test out social media monitoring to prove its value to your boss, Andiamo may just be the way to go. Version 2.0 is coming out soon and it will have some nifty new features such as email alerts to your PC or cell phone to notify you if sentiment is going sour.

Some of the company’s clients include Vertical Response (where John Hingley is one of the founders), Icon Estates, BullsEye Media, and Access Public Relations.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Visual mapping has been around for some time, but the tools have gotten easy enough and cheap enough for anyone to use. My friend John Jatinen at Epson showed me his imindmap this morning which made understanding the multi-division, global PR effort of this multi-national company rather easy to understand.

No doubt humans are better at consuming visual data. To organize strategy, plans, programs, or ideas for yourself or to communicate to others, it’s always better to use a visual tool. These aren’t charts I’d put up in Powerpoint. However, when you manage great complexity, it is easier to see all of the pieces in one place and make sure you are covering all of the bases (or if you’re not, at least you know what you’re missing).

I took a little test-drive using imindmap.com’s free 7-day trial. (You can get a 30-day free trial at visual-mind.com of software developed by the same company.) After you watch a short demo, it’s easy enough to get started and complete a map. The software license is $115 USD. (They call it a lifetime license, however, you will have to purchase upgrades/enhancements after the first year.)

I can think of several ways I will use this software, not only to get a handle on all of the services I provide (and to better market my company, book, etc.), but also in capturing strategy and plans I’m developing with my consulting clients.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Last week at SXSWi, I watched Sarah Lacy, a BusinessWeek columnist, interview Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO. This was positioned as a keynote presentation. Not surprisingly, the audience of creatives, Web developers and designers, social network managers, and so on expected a little meat in the talk. They would have liked a few details such as new features planned, or evolution of the company vision or strategy. Something they didn’t already know or read on the Web.

Somehow Sarah and Mark didn’t know this. They were having a little fireside chat with their insider comments and anecdotes of no relevance to anyone there. And although this post really isn’t about picking on Sarah and the fact that she had completely ignored who her audience was and what they came to hear, I can’t help but note many of us make the same mistake. Sarah was completely focused on herself — and often corporate marketing departments are too internally focused, too.

Well, you won’t be surprised, Sarah and Mark were pretty much booed off the stage.

We can’t always be perfectly prepared for each presentation or each marketing program. Sometimes we miss the mark. The key is not to get caught up in the mistake — or worse — continue making the mistake. As soon as you have a sense it’s not going well, adjust. Ask your audience what isn’t working and what they’d like to hear or receive.

We have the tools now to open a dialogue.

Popularity: 29% [?]

What is the cost of implementing social networking, and how do we measure success? Most executives want to know. A more important question is what is the cost of not doing social networking?

Setting up a site where your customers can talk to each other provides amazing value. You set up the platform, they do the work. Customers create a high value data source that keeps them coming back and attracts others to the site.

Social sites and blogs have turned out to be a highly effective early warning system. Companies are learning of problems they didn’t know they had and fixing them much more quickly. The biggest fear I hear from executives is that customers will rant about the problems we already know we have, but that take time to fix.

So these customers are ranting privately now and trying to figure out how not to use your product or service. They’re talking to your competitors instead of talking to other customers and the company trying to help solve these issues. If you know what your problems are, it’s likely the marketplace knows them too. Airing the issue and having a real, personal conversation with your audience about what you’re doing to fix these problems can keep customers from running away from you. It can build loyalty.

Why wait for your competitors to beat you to the punch and treat customers better.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Heinz Topthistv.com received 10 million views, Doritos’ Crash the Superbowl contest got a whopping 350 million press impressions, Burger King’s Subservient Chicken viral site reached 14 million unique visitors, and Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light Dude ad was viewed over 11 million times. With high profile campaigns setting the bar, how can you explain to your boss it’s not about the number of people we reach, it’s about reaching the right people?

We don’t all work for major brand consumer companies, but we still need to leverage the network effect of the Web. How? Determine up front if your goal is reach or touch. Reach is about getting the most views, interactions, or press impressions. It is to a much greater extent about brand recognition than about developing a relationship, context, or relevance.

Touch is about getting to the people who care most about your brand, or are most likely to care about your brand. It’s about getting them involved, interacting with your company or products, and learning enough to want to stay involved. Relevance is key.

So if you aren’t solely focused on reaching the largest possible number of people, what are you measuring? It really depends on the type of campaign, but here are some ideas: time spent on the landing page or subsequent product pages clicked on, number of forwards of the email, number of comments submitted, and corporate learning from the content of those comments, sales lift during or just after the campaign, or number of ideas generated.

Popularity: 30% [?]