Denise Shiffman’s Engage Daily Blog

Are you spending hours or days trying to determine which keywords are the best to promote your blog, web site page, product, or service? One way to narrow your choice and determine which term is searched on most often is by using GoogleFight.

The site is simple and easy-to-use. Just type in two keywords and see which “wins.” Then compare the winner with other keywords. Since the system tells you the number of results for that keyword, it’s easy to track which word of many keywords is the best choice.

Just a note, GoogleFight isn’t related to Google.

Popularity: 28% [?]

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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: 43% [?]

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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% [?]

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This is the small company Web. Just about every tool you need is available as a hosted service (or soon will be), and if you do a little research, you can find them for free.

It used to be difficult and expensive to work on your own. Who hasn’t been frustrated downloading and fixing software? And the cost, yikes! There have been so many applications out of the price range of the average consultant, artist, or small business owner. Those days are gone.

Ad supported services have made free the new keyword of choice. And the marketing strategy for new Web companies to offer a “beginner” version for free makes collaborating and staying organized easy and cost-effective for even the smallest company.

Following are some services that I’ve tried. There are many, many more — so just do a little searching for the tool that you need.

Highrise (37 Signals) - contacts organizer and action item reminders

Jott - voice to text for reminders, action items, or updates to yourself or your contacts

FreeConference - free teleconferences (US and Canada)

Wetpaint - create a public or private wiki and collaborate with people any where in the world. (I did at MarketingReinvented.com.)

Vyew - web conferencing

Popularity: 20% [?]

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