Tomorrow, the Summer Olympics begin in Rio! The MadAddie team is ready to root for #TeamUSA. We know you will be, too.

While the divers are diving and he gymnastics are doing backflips, MadAddie will keep showing off our feats of strength when it comes to the world of marketing. Our clients who are already part of the the MadAddie team are running circles around their competition.

Our friends at Bay State Elevator were recently featured in an Albany Times Union article about the new Renaissance Hotel in Downtown Albany. Bay State is the company that is in charge of keeping the hotel elevators in tip-top shape and Bay State is expanding across the region! We are so proud of them!

Last time I got into specifics about marketing, I focused on our undercover operations. For this post, I want to give you a taste of our ability to scour the internet to find out what everyday people are saying about you and your competitors.

The internet is full of ways to review businesses. Take your pick: Facebook, Google, Yelp, Glassdoor, and Twitter.

Now hang on, you might have just said to yourself, Twitter? They don’t have online reviews. True. But, people talk. If there’s an outlet for people to talk, they will talk about about anything - including experiences with your business and your competitors.

I’ll give you an example from my own life about the importance of knowing the internet buzz surrounding your business. Recently, I made use of a bus company to take a trip to visit friends, (I’ll leave them nameless as to not pick on them too much). The trip was terrible. The air conditioning was broken, the electric outlets were busted, the bathroom reeked. It was a miserable ride.

I took to Twitter to express my frustration. I tweeted directly at the business telling them, publicly, about my nightmare bus ride. To their credit, they were good about picking up on my tweet and responding to me via direct message. (That, by the way, should be a cornerstone of your company’s social media strategy - responding to customers).

My tweets about my experience are still on Twitter and will be forever. Now, I have not done any research into how many people complain about this particular bus company, but I added to the internet buzz of this bus company. And it wasn’t positive buzz.

A business can do a lot with accumulating internet buzz on their competition. One action a different bus company could have taken with me (but didn’t) was to notice my tweet, and offer me a discounted ride on one of THEIR busses.

A business can also get a strong sense of what the weaknesses of their competitors are and exploit them when trying to get more customers. Let’s say the bus company has an ongoing problem with air conditioning in busses.

There’s a social media campaign right there to exploit. #OurACsWork could trend on social media and use a coupon code called “WeKeepOurBusCool” as a coupon code. It will make viral an ad campaign and greatly expand how many people in the social media realm know about your competitors’ weakness. It’s a double slam dunk.

That's where our gold medal tactics come into play. We do the heavy lifting of using nifty tools and old fashioned elbow grease in getting a strong sense of what people are saying about competitors on their social media accounts. It's a qualitative and quantitative analysis. We examine how often your company or competitor is being discussed, where, when, and how. That information alone is invaluable.

If there was an Olympics for marketing, MadAddie would win the gold in every category. Scouring the web for internet buzz is just a piece of what we do. Check out more about our Mad Process and get mad with us.

We are the champions, as Queen would say. We hope #TeamUSA sweeps the Olympics. Speaking of Queen, it's music time! Hit it! #ThrowBackThursday