Interbrand recently released its 2009 list of the best 100 global brands. Social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos took a closer look at this data today. While Interbrand bases its list on criteria such as financial data, international scope and economic value added, Sysomos decided to re-evaluate the top 20 brands by their social media presence on blogs, forums and news sites. Sysomos did not include mentions on Twitter in this study. This obviously led to major changes to Interbrand’s list. Google, which placed only 7th on the Top 100 Brands list, ranks 1st when it comes to social media mentions in 2009, while Coca-Cola, the #1 brand on the Interbrand list, ranks only 11th on Sysomos’ list.
Interbrand’s ranking puts Coca Cola, IBM and Microsoft in the top 3, while the top 3 brands with the most social media mentions according to Sysomos are Google, Apple and Microsoft.
Fastest Growing Brand: Gillette
Among the top 20 brands, Gillette managed to become the fastest-growing brand in social media over the last two months. We wondered if the fact that the New England Patriots play in Gillette Stadium is a factor here, but Sysomos told us that most of the mentions were generated by Gillette’s campaign for its new Fusion razors. Strangely, though, 13 brands in Sysomos’ top 20 saw their social media mentions drop in the last two months. Car manufacturers like BMW (-31%), Honda (-25%) and Toyota (-24%) saw the largest declines, though even Google registered a 13.4% drop.
Sentiment Analysis
The fact that a company was mentioned often on social media sites like Twitter, however, doesn’t really tell us a lot about how exactly people interacted with this brand. To deal with this, Sysomos also did a sentiment analysis of all the mentions of these 20 companies. Here, we see some interesting changes to the list. Samsung, for example, comes out on top here, followed by Nokia, Intel, IBM and Cisco.
The social media mentions of McDonald’s, Marlboro and Toyota, however, were generally negative. According to another survey by PR firm Wildfire on behalf of Tealeaf that was published yesterday, 74% of all British adults said that negative comments about a product or brand negatively influence the likelihood that they would want to do business with this company.
