A blog for students of Professor Kagan's Digital Marketing Strategy course to comment and highlight class topics. From the various channels for marketing on the internet, to SaaS and e-commerce business models, anything related to the class is fair game.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Tracking Social Media, Word-of-Mouth
Despite all the buzz about social media, only 16% of marketing executives said their companies routinly monitor what people say online about them or their brands .
Building off Liron’s post, while only 16% of companies say they are doing an effective job in monitoring what people say about them, social media is being used more and more as a tool for brands to increase their presence in the public eye. An analysis performed by Vitrue shows the top social brands of 2008. Not surprisingly, Apple tops the list with three of its products featured in the top 10 “most social brands” (iPhone, iPod, Apple). Interestingly, however, Virtrue measures mentions, not the sentiment of those mentions.
“Each day, Vitrue analyzes the online conversations on a variety of social networking, blogging, microblogging, photo and video sharing sites… We apply a series of algorithms to reflect the frequency of usage, the size of the social media environment, and the magnitude of the conversation.”
So a brand could rank high on the social list, but it could be for the wrong reasons. Yet looking at the list, it appears that many of the top social brands are those that consumers historically have liked. But, as a marketer, would you prefer to be high on the “social media index” even if people are not saying positive things about your brand? Is all publicity good publicity? While we are seeing a trend toward the use of social media, we should be aware that consumers will not only praise, but will criticize the brand as well – especially the more loyal consumers, as their expectations of the brand are probably high. My guess is that before brands start spending their budgets on social media, they will want to know what people are saying, not just the fact they are saying something.
Top 10: 1. iPhone 2. CNN 3. Apple 4. Disney 5. Xbox 6. Starbucks 7. iPod 8. MTV 9. Sony 10. Dell
See more: http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=134180
1 comment:
Building off Liron’s post, while only 16% of companies say they are doing an effective job in monitoring what people say about them, social media is being used more and more as a tool for brands to increase their presence in the public eye. An analysis performed by Vitrue shows the top social brands of 2008. Not surprisingly, Apple tops the list with three of its products featured in the top 10 “most social brands” (iPhone, iPod, Apple). Interestingly, however, Virtrue measures mentions, not the sentiment of those mentions.
“Each day, Vitrue analyzes the online conversations on a variety of social networking, blogging, microblogging, photo and video sharing sites… We apply a series of algorithms to reflect the frequency of usage, the size of the social media environment, and the magnitude of the conversation.”
So a brand could rank high on the social list, but it could be for the wrong reasons. Yet looking at the list, it appears that many of the top social brands are those that consumers historically have liked. But, as a marketer, would you prefer to be high on the “social media index” even if people are not saying positive things about your brand? Is all publicity good publicity? While we are seeing a trend toward the use of social media, we should be aware that consumers will not only praise, but will criticize the brand as well – especially the more loyal consumers, as their expectations of the brand are probably high. My guess is that before brands start spending their budgets on social media, they will want to know what people are saying, not just the fact they are saying something.
Top 10:
1. iPhone
2. CNN
3. Apple
4. Disney
5. Xbox
6. Starbucks
7. iPod
8. MTV
9. Sony
10. Dell
See more:
http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=134180
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