August 5th, 2008
The 2008 Olympics in China are already generating a great deal of buzz in the Social Media world, particularly around certain Olympic Sponsors. Collective Intellect is actively tracking the buzz around Visa, McDonald’s, UPS, General Electric, Coca-Cola, Panasonic and Kodak. By comparing all sponsors and evaluating each sponsors lift through increase in online conversation, CI will be able to measure the success of each Olympic campaign and ultimately the value of Olympic spending.
Activity and sentiment analysis will play a large roll in online Olympic tracking. For example, although Visa currently has the largest share-of-voice at 42% (see chart below) of the seven selected sponsors, they also have the largest amount of negative sentiment. As the Olympics approach and we continue to dig deeper, it will be interesting to see if this trend changes over time and if negative themes emerge in the Visa Olympic sponsorship conversations that occur.
Throughout the Olympic Games, CI will continue to track and analyze data trends for these major sponsors and release findings along the way. Stay tuned; the Olympics kick-off Friday.
Is amount of buzz really a measure of success? How does it relate to ROI or sales?
TO’B
What time period are you using here?
Hi Tom,
Great question and one that merits more than a simple blog reply. “Buzz” is certainly a measure of success in social media marketing terms (as exposure and TV ratings are an inexact but important part of measuring mass media advertising success). And social media activity certainly needs to be qualified - positive buzz can only be related positively to sales or targeted web activity while negative buzz may be more ambiguous. Finally, sales and other data can be correlated with social media data for a general comparison or can be treated more rigorously to try and derive a better estimate of ROI. Fair warning that any marketing mix estimation (i.e., getting ROI) is a challenging endeavor!
Feel free to contact me directly as needed - (978) 807-0435.
Dean
VP Social Media Analytics,
Collective Intellect