New Social Media Brings Bizarre Terms and Issues  -
What’s Splog?
Marketers need the tools for dealing with and succeeding in today’s social marketing realm

San Francisco, CA. (May 21, 2008) – New social media has ushered in an array of new terminology, tactics and opportunities for marketers. Wikis, blogs, social networks, RSS, and “engagement” are increasingly common phrases used in today’s social marketing conversations. Yet lurking out there is a term marketers don’t want to hear-- that of splog. The term ‘splog’ has been around for more than two years, yet there is little awareness of it and the affect it can have on social media marketing, especially Social Media Measurement. Splog can dramatically skew results, which in turn can lead to faulty and costly marketing mistakes and campaigns that miss the mark.

Ask ten marketing professionals if they’re familiar with the term ‘splog’, and seven will typically say “yes”. But ask those seven what they think splog really means, and you’ll get a range of answers ranging from “Something to do with blogs” to “It’s a new marketing tool.”

So what exactly is splog? According to Wikipedia, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites, which the author uses to promote affiliated websites, or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites.

The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator, which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.

According to John Hingley, founder & CEO of Andiamo Systems, a leading social media measurement firm, “In short, splog is to blogs what spam is to email. Just like unscrupulous people leverage the pervasiveness of email to sell medications or to phish, the same type of folks create blogs stuffed with popular search terms in order to get high search engine rankings. These bogus blogs include paid advertising links which can earn the splogger significant money.”

So why does it matter? “As with email spam, splog creates a high ‘signal to noise’ ratio,” adds Hingley. “It’s not uncommon, depending on the industry and even seasonality, for us to identify and eliminate 20-40% of all incoming data as splog.”

Today’s leading companies are realizing the value of monitoring and measuring what’s being said about them on blogs, message boards, forums and social networks. An important step is to identify when splog is affecting your marketing efforts. Do you know when there’s a lot of illegitimate blogs out there that potentially include your brand? These splog create a false measurement of the true relevant conversations occurring about you equating into the potential to make decisions based on misleading data, which in turn is costly.

Andiamo Systems has advanced technology in place that routinely identifies, tags and eliminates splog, so the reports they provide reports are very accurate. Adds Hingley, “Sploggers are crafty, and their approaches and tricks vary continuously. That’s why our systems learn each time a new splog framework is detected, and feeds back into our heuristics to enable us to automatically get more efficient in eliminating slog.”

Andiamo offers a leading application in the marketplace to assist those in marketing, corporate communications and sales roles grasp and understand just what is being said about a particular product, company or service online. The advanced technology actively collects, processes and analyzes online social media data from millions of blogs, message boards, forums, social networks like MySpace and Flickr plus mainstream media including news sites and trade publications. The result is a suite of web-based reports that identifies the conversations occurring around brands, who the most influential speakers are, and whether the conversations are positive or negative bout those brands. Positioned as a first-mover product for the midsize business, the social media analysis and brand monitoring application enables users to identify and act upon online consumer sentiment with much grater ease, accuracy and affordability.

Customers can sign up immediately and pricing begins at an affordable $500 per month. Interested companies are welcome to request a demonstration at www.andiamosystems.com.

About Andiamo Systems
Andiamo Systems is a privately-held San Francisco-based on-demand software company empowering business of all sizes to monitor, measure and act on consumer conversations across the spectrum of online social media and mainstream media. Get more information about Andiamo Systems at www.andiamosystems.com or call 866-992-6342.

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Media Contact:
Stacia Kirby, Kirby Communications
stacia@speakeasy.net
(206) 363-149