It is no secret that people talk about brands online as much as they talk about everything else. How much people talk about a brand online can be indicative of interest of the public about it but also indicative that things are going wrong. (Remember the Dell exploding battery some years ago). If we accept that "Every publicity is good publicity" then it is interesting for (online) marketers to know how popular their brand is in blogs, online forums, communities and video sharing sites. This is certainly one way of using Social Media as marketing tools, the approach I call Passive (i.e. listening to the market voice) in my Web 2.0 marketing tools model.
For those interested about the top Social Brands there is the Virtue 100-Top Social Brands index. The top ten brands according to the index are:
1.iPhone 2.CNN 3.Apple 4.Disney 5.Xbox 6.Starbucks 7.iPod 8.MTV 9.Sony 10.Dell. The rest in the Virtue site.
The index is a useful tool constructed on the base of a sound methodology. It would be interesting of course any one of my colleagues attempts to measure the relationship between the usage level of the Social Media by the brand sponsors and the ranking of a brand. What is interesting also is that in the top 10 list three of the brands are media brands and that Apple dominates the list with 3 of its brands.
What the index does not say is whether the online buzz about brands is positive or negative. Maybe we have to wait a bit longer for that.
p.s. In the technology blog BLORGE I recently read a story about an exploding iPhone! Hopefully an isolated incident and not the reason of the Social Media popularity of the brand.
