The Most Social Brands of 2008

Apple Wins by Sheer Volume of Mentions, at Least

Posted by Abbey Klaassen on 01.29.09 @ 02:00 PM

Pop quiz: What was the brand or branded product most often mentioned in social media at the end of last year?

If you guessed the iPhone, as probably 90% of you did, you'd be right. But you might be surprised at just how dominant Apple and its brands are in terms of online chatter: IPhone is joined by Apple and iPod in the top 10 most mentioned brands or branded products list.

The analysis is from social-media-services provider Vitrue, which launched a social-media index last year. It measures the conversation volume around 2,000 brands on a variety of social-networking, blogging and micro-blogging sites. This survey stuck to a pretty rudimentary metric -- it measures mentions, not the sentiment of those mentions or the word pairings.

"This is measuring velocity and volume in December 2008," CEO Reggie Bradford told Ad Age. We asked him for full disclosure of how many are clients and he said, "Some are, some aren't, and many more clients didn't make the list." He wouldn't specify who exactly has employed Vitrue's services, but noted that of the top 20, "just a handful" were clients.

In addition to Apple and its branded products, media brands also dominated the top-10 list: CNN bested Disney and MTV for the No. 2 spot. The rest of the top 10 was consumer-electronics-heavy: XBox, Starbucks, Sony and Dell.

The only auto to sneak into the top 20 was Ford, at No. 12. Honda was the next-most talked-about, in the No. 25 spot. Surprisingly, Lincoln followed that, at No. 28. One important caveat, however: It's unclear whether the chatter was positive or, perhaps, related to the government auto bailouts from late 2008.

Anything surprise you about the top 50? (The rest can be found on Vitrue's blog.)

iPhone
CNN
Apple
Disney
Xbox
Starbucks
iPod
MTV
Sony
Dell
Microsoft
Ford
Nintendo
Target
PlayStation
Mac
Turner
Hewlett-Packard
Fox News
BlackBerry
ABC
Coke
LG
Best Buy
Honda
eBay
Sharp
Lincoln
NBA
Pepsi
General Motors
McDonald's
General Electric
Walmart
NFL
Mercedes
BMW
Samsung
Nike
Subway
Dodge
Pandora
CBS
Mercury
NBC
Disneyland
Last.fm
Toyota
Cadillac
Chevy

12 Comments

By jvanderson | Atlanta, GA January 29, 2009 05:41:42 pm:

Thank you for the article, Abbey! To follow up on the question about how many of the Top 20 are Vitrue clients: in the past 24 months, we have had a commercial relationship with 4 of the Top 20 brands on the list. In addition, in the past 6 months I am aware of sales calls we have made on 12 more of the Top 20 (it may be a failure on our part to have not hit all 20!).

We spent a considerable amount of time on the topic of "sentiment", and concluded that the English language makes it a practical impossibility to accurately and simply categorize comments into positive and negative. We believe that true sentiment analysis is best handled as a specialized research field, and have a great deal of respect for the firms who take on that challenge.

Interestingly, a client's *interest* in social media does not seem to correlate with their ranking. Social media seems to be on the mind of nearly every marketer, no matter where they fall on the list!

Jim Anderson
Chief Product Officer
Vitrue, Inc.

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By NickMendoza | SANTA MONICA, CA January 29, 2009 07:58:59 pm:

Thanks Jim and the team at Vitrue for this revealing look at the top brands. In addition to Apple, looks like The Walt Disney Company was a big winner: Disney #4, ABC #21, Disneyland #46 and Walt Disney World #67 (although ESPN's absence is a surprise).

I noticed that Sony and PlayStation; along with Microsoft and its Xbox made the list. Nintendo is at #13, but the Wii doesn't appear in the top 100. Any reason for it? Also, is there a report available with deeper analytics on the rankings? Appreciate the efforts behind this list.

http://twitter.com/NickMendoza

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By statiktv | STAMFORD, CT January 30, 2009 07:14:47 am:

I think the title of this article is a tad bit misleading. I was expecting to see a list of brands who are the most active in outreaching to social communities and participating themselves.

But either way, this is a great list. Thanks Abbey and Jim from Virtue.

http://keaneangle.com

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By aubrey.brewis | McLean, VA January 30, 2009 10:53:17 am:

Does Obama count as a brand? Surprised not to see him on there...

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By radicaltrust | Toronto, ON January 30, 2009 11:36:38 am:

Where's Obama? Seems to me he was a much bigger brand in 08 than even the ubiquitous iPhone.

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By dkimball48 | Brandon, MS January 30, 2009 12:18:01 pm:

Though a great article, I too wonder about the absence of Obama.

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By bam4310 | Kansas City, MO January 30, 2009 12:32:08 pm:

Interesting to see but without any sentiment or topic association it's not immediately clear how the data is useful in terms of brand management.

One might consider it comparing brands by category in terms of mentions and attempt to correlate it with share of market or share of voice to identify trends/gaps. Just a thought.

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By jvanderson | Atlanta, GA January 30, 2009 12:45:41 pm:

Nick, the Wii rolls up under Nintendo's score. Given its popularity, we plan to break it out as its own brand (separate from Nintendo) on future versions of the list. We'll describe more fully our thinking about "When does a product become its own unique brand?" in a future update to the Methodology portion of the Vitrue 100 website.

Aubrey, Collin, and David: You are right that Obama's score would place him very high on the list--at the top, actually. We intentionally excluded public figures from this list of Brands, as adding them (think Sarah Palin, Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears, Steve Jobs, Michael Phelps, Stephen Colbert) would turn it into a substantially different list. A compilation of the "Most 'Social' Public Figures" will no doubt be an interesting list itself.

Thanks to all for the comment and feedback!

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By ABBEY | NEW YORK, NY January 30, 2009 02:36:24 pm:

Keane: I thought about that when brainstorming a headline. But I think there's two ways the phrase "social brands" can be interpreted. One is that a brand is active in social media and continually reaching out to consumers via social-media tools. (Dell, Comcast and others represent this group.) The other is that there is something about the brand -- an incredibly useful product, great design -- that makes people want to talk about it even if the brand doesn't do a lot of active social-media outreach. (Apple, obviously, falls into this group.) This list emphasizes why practices like design and product development are so important and that the best marketers and agencies are those who understand they need to have to play a role in those areas. (See Jonah Bloom's most recent column: http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=133834)

--Abbey Klaassen, Ad Age

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By jackiboa | london, UK May 20, 2009 06:10:52 am:

We intentionally excluded public figures from this list of Brands, as adding them (think Sarah Palin, Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears, Steve Jobs, Michael Phelps, Stephen Colbert) would turn it into a substantially different list. A compilation of the "Most 'Social' Public Figures" will no doubt be an interesting list itself.
Brochure Design | Stationary Design | Logo Design

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By jackiboa | london, UK May 20, 2009 06:11:57 am:

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By gmiddleton | Indiana, PA August 31, 2009 12:13:40 pm:

Thanks for sharing the list! It's pretty interesting to see the companies who topped it, although it wasn't too much of a surprise :)

Gaston
http://www.Ultimate-Resell-Rights.com

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