As a whole I am not very trusting of the list as it is not being published with the aggregated data. These leaves a lot of assumption and faith in regards to the top social brands.

More importantly, the SMI as it currently stands doesn’t take into play impact analysis to real world business results. While it provides us with some conversational items, there isn’t much meat on the bone.

It would be great to see how the Obama campaign would have been rated in compaison!

Really helpful post – thanks!

Thanks for this post. As a grad who will graduate in 2010, I love this type of information. I have pretty much made up my mind that I would like to deal with social media within PR as my desired career. So this type of information is invaluable to me in helping draw direct real-world correlaries to what I get from schooling.

Now if only I could say that finding a job in this economy would be as easy as learning information off your posts, then all would be right with the world.

BTW, are the Conversation Prism and Index the types of things that you would show prospective clients, in order to help them better understand why they need to have a presence in the world of social media? Or would it just end up confusing them?

http://www.pandora.com/people/socialsoundsystem

Very cool to see it mapped out in this way. Thanks again.

Thanks for pointing out Virtue’s report. From looking at the top brands, it seems that this report speaks more about the relationships of the avid social media user than any active effort from the brands.

I’d be interested to see how competitors’ social media mentions stack-up when compared to market share.

It’s about creativity.

It’s about the “interpretation” of the law – not the law itself. The biggest work that a true social media “expert” can provide is not only the ability to convince management to experiment tied to deliverable results, but also demonstrate to the legal department how other companies are doing so without consequence. In my experience, the law didn’t change, people and internal policies adapted to the new web.

The index is a bit skewed, and as I mentioned, it implies that these companies had a hand in influencing and sparking dialog across the social web, when in fact most have not.

You can truly only automate the search process in a minority of the total discussions represented in the conversation prism. The rest is by hand. So, in this case, it’s about blogger relations, blog comments and twitter I suspect.

The point is, if you’re not actively finding a way for your brand to either proactively appear or respond across the board, it will affect the ranking. THE MAJORITY of those brand appearances are driven by people (consumers) discussing a brand…not the work of marketing or PR fueling viral discussions. This is an important distinction and also an important lesson for us. I suspect that these results would be similar if we were to place microphones in every break room, restaurant, train, public square, etc.

My inspiration for this post was to help “brands” take the lead to create their own social media index for an industry and also, and more importantly, a conversation index specifically for any company you represent.

Carla, you can bet that’s the case and when you do this by hand or use tools such as ReTweetist and blogpulse.com/conversation, you can track the threads.

Gwendolen, thanks. Just need to figure out how to stop time a bit

The Lost Agency, I highly suspect that this list is truly powered by the people and not the brands per se…meaning that this is bottom up tracking of chatter as it exists with or without the participation of a company. Searching iphone in blogsearch.google.com and Twitter is going to net a HUGE response: 22.6 million in blogsearch (http://tinyurl.com/cxshzp) and millions in Twitter (http://tinyurl.com/6ll3s3). Is apple a top social media company? Not at all…but iPhone is a highly socialized brand – fully democratized and discussed by consumers for consumers. In the 2 minutes it took me to write this comment back to you, over 70 new responses appeared in twitter – without a catalyst or push stemming from apple.

Perhaps the report is misleading, because it almost implies that these companies are directly responsible for being a “top social” brand, when in fact, the report tracks mentions of a brand in the social Web.

It was very interesting to note that not one of the top 100 brands was a health care company/brand/product or campaign. Do you have any thoughts on why that might be? It seems that either because of a lack of creativity or the legal ramifications of transparency prevents our clients from really stepping out and establishing their brands in the digital arena.

Thanks again for any thoughts you might have on this.

I was wondering why iPhone, iPod and Apple are mentioned as 3 different brands in the Top Social Brand list. Is there any specific reason? (probably, I just don’t know )

What would be fascinating is to understand the origin of the buzz. That is, determine whether a communal buzz arose nationwide after, say, after a specific piece of news or event, OR if there were individual connectors who Paul Revered the message and were responsible for having ignited the conversation into viral heaven.