John Hingley, CEO, Andiamo Systems

MM
John, if you would, give us a little of your background. A little bit of your history and some on your company.

JH
Sure thing. I’ve been involved in direct marketing and business development in the technology and consumer packaged goods industry for the past 25 years or so. I’ve seen a lot from both the B2B and B2C side of things.

Most recently, prior to starting Andiamo Systems, I started a boutique advertising agency for the wine-and-spirits industry called, “Crush Direct.” Prior to that, I was the COO at Wine.com, which was a very interesting turnaround time for that company, as it was going through a new iteration of its business model, and a [D] series of financing.

I was there for two years, and we actually brought that company to its first profitable quarter ever during that time period. That was in 2003.

Before that, I was a founding member of a company called “Yaga.” That was a very interesting company. This was born just after the dot-bomb-2001-when it was very, very hard to get financing. This was a P2P content distribution network. That means they had the ability to transfer big files efficiently across the internet. Those could be perhaps movies or movie clips moving across the internet, using a peer-based model instead of a single-server model.

We were marketing to folks like Warner Brothers, Paramount Picture and Disney as a good alternative way to distribute film.

It ended up we were a bit early on for the industry. Overall, we had a hard time figuring out the business model in a way that made sense and made it a real, thriving business. We did end up selling that company to another player in the field-called BitPass.

Just before that, my wife and I both went through the San Francisco-based dot-com and dot-bomb. I was at The Learning Company, which Mattel bought out for about $3.8 billion. We called my division Mattel Interactive. That was a way for them to get more high-tech. Around the same time, the company my wife worked for, xoom.com, went public.

So knowing that it’s pretty rare for a working couple to ever have the opportunity to take a break at the same time, we went for it. We moved to France for a light break, but of course, we couldn’t rest. About four months after we moved to France, we moved back to San Francisco and started up a company called VerticalResponse, which is now a leading Email Service Provider. Janine is the CEO and the driving force behind its success.

Then before that, there were many stints at both publishing company, education and software companies, as well as my own company-back in the early-early ’80s.

MM
It would be fair to say, then, John, that you’ve made most of the mistakes that one could make.

JH
I learn something every day and make mistakes every day, I’m sure. But yes, I’ve been through the wringer with the good and bad times.

MM
That’s a great context for then describing the launch of Andiamo Systems. So, what is Andiamo Systems about?

JH
Andiamo Systems is a social media measurement and analysis company. That means that we collect, process analyze and then report on everything that people are saying about our clients’ brands across the vast spectrum of online media.

Whether it’s a customer talking about a wine they like or don’t like on a blog, or someone else talking about what they think about the Blade Runner IV release on Blu-Ray on another forum. Or someone talking about my wife’s company VerticalResponse on a message board.

We have the technology that captures and collects on a continual basis all of that information. We process out all of the splog and all of irrelevant false-positive matches. Then we run it through a set of algorithms with a layer of human review.Then at the end of the process, we make very intuitive reports available to our business clients. This tells them how much is being said about them online, where it’s coming from, if it’s mainstream media versus consumer-generated media. Whether it’s blogs or forums. Whether it’s message boards, social networks and the like.

Most importantly, we report on how much influence the people have that are talking have over brand perception and purchase intent in that industry. And what the sentiment is-what the real consumer opinion is toward the brand, and how it is trending over time. Both at the very granular level and overall. What the brand’s health and reputation is for these brands online.

The genesis of this was something that was born out of real-life experience. At Crush Direct, we worked with a couple of new wind brands actually owned by large companies. One was owned by Fosters, the large Australian wine company. They came to us wanting help in launching a new wine called “the Little Penguin” on a very, very tight budget. Basically zero budget.

We did something that I think was clever, but also lucky. We decided to create a series of interactive web-based content promotions around these brands. We seeded blogs with little contests. We passed them along and got ready for the launch of this product, et cetera. We made it very interactive and very oriented toward two things. Pass-alongs and signing up to receive more information about these brands.

Bottom line-both of these product launches were very, very successful. They far outpaced expectations. As a direct marketer, I always want to quantify everything I can. I went in knowing that half of our success was probably dumb luck. The other half was probably some fairly sharp things we did.

So, I started to go in and manually mine blogs and do blog searches and forum searches. To see who was talking about these brands and what they were talking about. Who seemed to be a promoter? Who seemed to be a detractor? Who seemed to have a lot of influence and traffic to their website. I could then in turn take those successes and have a better chance of replicating those, going forward.

I found that in addition to this exercise just being a mind-numbingly dull and tedious job, it’s very error-prone to do it by pure human review. It’s very expensive and not timely. It takes way too much time to go back and find all this information manually, and then rate it on sentiment and speaker influence and the like, so you actually get a timely report of what’s going on with your brand online.

I did some market research-still without the thought of starting one of these companies myself. I just wanted help in an automated solution to gauge and measure social media. This is going back a few years-about three years, now.

The market was dominated by enterprise players with very prohibitively expensive solutions. Except for the top Fortune 500 companies. These are 6-figure solutions-very much enterprise software. Not Software as a Service (SaaS).

MM
You’re talking more like autonomy and fast and those kinds of things?

JH
As well as Nielsen BuzzMetrics-Umbria, Biz360 and some of the more new-age folks that have been around five years or so. That really attacked the problem from a human scale perspective. A lot of hand-holding. Not that much technology. Like I said-very, very geared just toward a fraction of the market.

One of them actually pitched one of my wine clients, called “The Little Penguin,” after the success of the online launch. I sat in on this pitch, and I thought it was a very well done business presentation and pitch. But at the end of the presentation, they laid out a 6-figure annual budget for what they wanted to do and provide to this wine brand. The 6-figure budget for social media analysis was more than this person’s marketing budget in a given year.

So that is where the market was, four years ago. What I decided on the drive back from Napa to San Francisco was to go for it. To start my own company that provides social media analysis in a SaaS approach-very timely, affordable and intuitive. That means you don’t need to be a market researcher to understand the information that we provide. We really aim to make our reporting as intuitive, actionable and easy to understand as possible.

Going on two and a half years ago, while still running Crush, I specced out the product and hired a great product manager and a good technical team to begin developing this product.