Monday, March 31, 2008

Social Media Top Brands

There are hundreds,thousands and millions of new, user-generated conversations happening online every single day. Individuals are joining social networks, posting comments on a blogs and forums, adding their thoughts to a wiki or sharing media with others through various content sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr. The rise of conversationally oriented content and collaborative hosting environments has grown so rapidly that according to Datamonitor, in just three years time 70% of online content will be user generated. Even Technorati the mammoth of blog monitoring covers less than half of the estimated amount of blogs worldwide of 171 million.

So amidst this growing user driven conversation bubble what Brand's are truly making a splash? We recently stumbled across an excellent study called "The Top 100 Brands" by Immediate Future. They did a comprehensive study to find out what brands have the most "share of voice" within popular social networking sites and other social media mediums.

Here are some of the specifics on how they performed the analysis as written by Immediate Future.


"Social network group sentiment analysis
To gain a measure of the overall sentiment of brand-focused groups set up on Social networks, brand name searches were conducted across three major social network sites Facebook, Flickr and MySpace. All groups focused primarily upon a brand were recorded and split in accordance to whether the overall tone was positive, negative or neutral.

Brands share of voice in social media
Discovering share of voice provides a snapshot of brand mentions in social media. It does not take into account the influence of the mentions and therefore measure the impact of the conversations. It is the first step in the discovery and mapping of a brand's social media landscape and it enables brands to identify the noise or buzz about them online.

By measuring the number of times the Interbrand top 100 global brands are mentioned across the most prominent social media sites, it is possible to determine which brands are the most talked about. The bigger the noise, the more important it is for brands to examine who is talking about them, what they are saying and if they are influential. It is the first step in engaging with social media and participating in the conversation." (Immediate Future)

Here are the top 25 brands in Social Media and their Share of Voice in popular Social Mediums.

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As you can see the majority of the top brands operate within the online technology and include search giants Google and Yahoo! No surprise they get a significant amount of conversation and content sharing occuring within YouTube as well as have a large blog swell surrounding them. What is kind of interesting is that the two leaders Google and Yahoo! have a relatively small share of voice within MySpace when compared to that of Cannon, Disney, Ford, Samsung, Gap, MTV and many others. Exactly why is this occurring? Here are two possible reasons for this occurrence..any to add?

Technical communities vs. evangelism groups- Google and Yahoo! are surrounded by very focused conversations and topics about search strategies and specific inquiries. MySpace is comprised of typically unfocused activities and conversations about a particular thread....

Producer vs. Aggregator: As search destinations, not product "producers" Google and Yahoo! are widely adopted and therefore don't have an "elite" group of supporters around them. Users assume that Google and Yahoo! are the staple of search already so why bother joining a group about it? On the other hand organizations producing multiple products can garner early adopters through a social mediums like MySpace.

Why is it important to know your share of conversation in the Social Media sphere?

Knowing where relative conversations around your brand are occurring can not only tell you a lot about your online presence it can be a personality check regarding your actual brand. Is it being perceived as conversational, engaging and shareable? Why is it only showing up in certain places? How does its current perception and online dispersion possibly affect future social media initiatives? If you haven"t taken a "deep" dive into the conversations currently surrounding your brand we strongly recommend in doing so. Let our social media and online PR division "Umunngo" show you how to create and be a part of the online conversations occurring around your brand.

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