Nowadays, buzz around brands on the news, blogs, tweets and other social media that spreads through product launches, PR campaigns, earnings reports are as valuable as traditional ad campaigns. But buzz and social dialogue on the web is tough to quantify. General Sentiment has released a report that calculates the dollar value of the buzz, content, and conversation taking place online. General Sentiment’s technology evaluates the volume of mentions and sentiment value regarding a brand, company or person. The algorithm combines this data with website traffic and online news readership figures to determine the purchase-equivalent dollar value of the brand exposure across more than 30 million sources by gauging sentiment, frequency, and exposure of news mentions and social dialogue.
Google topped the rankings, with value of its “buzz” itemized at $669.6 million. Google’s social media reach costs $402 million, with its Twitter reach alone valued at $22.8 million. On the other hand, Apple came in fourth with total buzz reaching $293.2 million; social media buzz valued at $223.7 million; and Twitter reach valued at $5.6 million.
Here’s the list of the top 20 brands according the the value of their “Buzz”. Numbers are measured in thousands. The report is embedded below.
| Company | News Media | Social Media | Total | ||
| 1 | $244,593 | $402,279 | $22,756 | $669,629 | |
| 2 | Microsoft | $184,473 | $452,006 | $12,252 | $648,732 |
| 3 | Sony | $80,574 | $207,907 | $5,825 | $294,308 |
| 4 | Apple | $63,947 | $223,657 | $5,632 | $293,237 |
| 5 | Yahoo | $50,324 | $236,087 | $5,354 | $291,766 |
| 6 | Intel | $93,665 | $189,880 | $2,139 | $285,685 |
| 7 | Ford | $145,369 | $39,082 | $1,453 | $185,905 |
| 8 | IBM | $62,683 | $85,957 | $1,740 | $150,381 |
| 9 | Citigroup | $105,614 | $24,961 | $749 | $131,326 |
| 10 | HP | $46,249 | $67,222 | $2,423 | $115,896 |
| 11 | eBay | $50,179 | $56,889 | $4,672 | $115,740 |
| 12 | Oracle | $43,413 | $70,838 | $1,435 | $115,686 |
| 13 | McDonalds | $80,579 | $32,842 | $1,840 | $115,263 |
| 14 | Disney | $67,166 | $35,811 | $4,411 | $107,390 |
| 15 | Nokia | $28,560 | $71,843 | $2,369 | $102,772 |
| 16 | GE | $75,452 | $24,536 | $885 | $100,864 |
| 17 | Dell | $34,491 | $43,990 | $1,553 | $80,035 |
| 18 | American Express | $56,576 | $19,803 | $648 | $77,028 |
| 19 | Cisco | $41,579 | $25,273 | $735 | $67,588 |
| 20 | Blackberry | $22,706 | $41,678 | $2,038 | $66,422 |
brand –
Those are some oddly specific numbers.
They are x1000
This is really good news, considering my startup’s PR budget for our upcoming open beta launch is basically $0.
too bad ‘buzz’ is highly speculative, generally undefinable and means absolutely nothing without conversion. good luck collecting money from someone who just talks about your product.
But maybe another person who listens to this just-talking persons buys the product.
It would be really interesting to know the algorithm being used here – the numbers are, as Stanfordgym says, very specific – so there must be something quite interesting being used to work out the resulting ‘worth’.
There are so many research agencies coming out with these surveys at the moment, and they’re all different, it’s tricky knowing who is most accurate.
wow, those numbers look meaningless without any context. I’ve not seen any real business value attached to “buzz” anyway, it’s like “hits” in the old days of the web.
Did Techcrunch merge with Mashable?
Interesting how this product compares to the ability of Insttant which was showcased at the last TC50 conference. Any actually used either product?
Essentially this type of calculation is ‘advertising value equivalency’ (AVE.) It’s incredibly over-simplistic and flawed. The UK’s biggest advertiser, the COI has recently recommended dropping AVE as a measure after an industry consultation. The COI guide also acknowledges the inconvenient truth that measurement of digital activity is still too complex, nuanced and nascent to have a simple formula applied to it. Congrats to General Sentiment for generating some PR for themselves on Techcrunch for this, but I would respectfully suggest that whilst interesting, it’s not actually useful data.
Here’s the COI PR evaluation guide:
http://coi.gov.uk/documents/guidance/pr-evaluation-metrics.pdf