Hasta La Creative!

Here’s a snapshot at Twitter share of voice and sentiment for top companies in several major industries: Media & Entertainment, Finance, Retail, Telecommunications, Quick-service restaurants, Health, Auto, Nonprofits, Alcohol, Travel, Tech, and CPG.

For each industry, social insight firm Topsy made a chart showing the share of voice for the top 10 businesses or brands with the share of Twitter mentions for each brand across the entire year including events that caused particular spikes.

The charts also show a list of the brands (combining name and Twitter handle) ranked by Topsy’s social sentiment score. To compute the sentiment score, Topsy analyzes about 200 million English-language tweets each day, computes minute-by-minute sentiment for every term in every tweet, and creates scaled scores for all terms, such as the brands and businesses listed here. The scores range from 0 (negative) to 100 (positive), with 50 as neutral.

1. Media and Entertainment

Disney takes the cake for top sentiment score in the Media and Entertainment industry in 2012. (This might also be due to mentions of vacations at the popular Disney parks.) The Discovery Channel and HBO follow in slots 2 and 3, and the MTV video music awards in September caused a huge increase in Twitter chatter:

2. Finance

American Express comes out on top in the financial industry with an average sentiment score of 89.4 for the year. Visa and Mastercard follow closely behind with 83.6 and 71.2, respectively. In terms of chatter volume, when Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith resigned in March, posting a public account of his resignation for the New York Times, tweets about Goldman Sachs spiked significantly. In addition, talk surrounding British bank HSBC grew quickly in both July and December, when the bank was under fire for money laundering allegations.

3. Retail

Best Buy had the highest Retail sentiment score on Twitter, followed by Lowes and Costco. There were also spikes in conversation for Walmart, Best Buy, and Macy’s on Black Friday:

4. Telecommunications

Boost Mobile ranks #1 for Twitter sentiment among telecommunications companies, followed by AT&T and Century Link as #2 and #3. Major spikes in tweet volume over the year were for T-mobile in May, when the company ran their 4G Tweet Race promotion, and for AT&T in September, when their online “It can wait” pledge – a call to not text while driving – was trending:

5. Quick-service restaurants

The quick-service restaurant with the highest sentiment score for 2012 was Starbucks, with a score of 88.8. Sonic (86.3) and Chipotle (84.3) weren’t far behind. The only signifiant hike in Twitter chatter came from backlash surrounding Chicken fast food restaurant Chick-fil-A in July-August, when company founder Dan Cathy defended Chick-fil-A’s stance against gay marriage:

6. Health

Gym and fitness center 24 Hour Fitness received the #1 spot by online sentiment for 2012 with a high average of 90.7. Popular dance-fitness program Zumba follows closely behind with a score of 89.4:

7. Auto

Which car brands were the most popular this year? Scion takes the cake, while Acura and Audi follow. A small spike in chatter surrounding Acura occurred during the 2012 Superbowl, when their website crashed temporarily:

8. Nonprofits

In the nonprofit sector, United Way, Charity :water and World Vision steal slots 1, 2, and 3 in a close race for highest sentiment score in 2012. The largest spike in volume surrounded the Invisible Children organization, which released a video in March exposing the Lord’s Resistance Army warlord, Joseph Kony, and the plight of African children under his influence. Shortly thereafter, the organization saw widespread criticism for its “hollywood style” campaigning, and controversy surrounded the charity’s leader:

9. Alcohol

Which types of drinks did people kick back with this year? Natural Light, Bud Light, and Guinness were the Twittersphere’s top 3 choices in 2012, with huge spikes in conversation for Bud Light advertisements during the Superbowl and for the classic Irish Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day:

10. Travel

Just as we found in our last airline ranking blog post, Virgin America has the highest average online sentiment in 2012. (For this post we analyzed sentiment for both name and Twitter handle, so the scores are somewhat different.) Virgin America was followed by Travelocity and Expedia, both discount travel booking websites. The largest increase in chatter involved British Airways in June-July, when they became fully integrated with the former British Midlands International. At the same time, British airways also ran a Twitter contest to win lunch with the British boy band One Direction.

11. Tech

While online market giants eBay and Amazon take the top two slots for sentiment score, the most significant hikes in chatter involved Apple. When Apple stock topped $600 a share in March, Twitter was abuzz with opinions and hopes for the tech company’s future. In addition, the social Web lit up with more Apple discussion in August-September, when Apple won their copyright battle against their competitor Samsung:

12. Consumer packaged goods

Finally – what common products were Twitter users buying this year? It seems that beauty products by Covergirl and L’Oreal scored the highest sentiment scores, followed by the Pillsbury baking brand (a branch of General Mills/Smuckers). In addition, Pepsi was a popular topic of conversation after their television commercial efforts, both during the Superbowl in February and for their later Drew Brees vs. One Direction commercial aired in October:

Cookies. They’ve been used as a method of online targeting since Netscape introduced them in the nineties. However, they are fraught with problems such as blocking, expiration, privacy issues and duplication. According to a whitepaper from Semcasting, only 50 percent of a target audience is identifiable by cookie because the rest are blocked or the cookie expires and just one out of three of those cookies represent a unique user, less than 20 percent of an audience is actually being reached.

Of course, this being a whitepaper offering, Semcasting has a solution to the problem. It’s called IP Zone Targeting and involves going beyond simple geographic IP targeting. Seamcasting has developed a technology that allows advertisers to target user type (home, business, government, etc.) and demographics (750 of them).

Download the whitepaper now to learn more about Semcasting’s IP Zone targeting.

Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. reached $9.26 billion for the third quarter of 2012, making the quarter the biggest on record, according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report figures released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PwC US. These figures show an 18 percent climb year-over-year, in comparison to Q3 2011’s $7.8 billion. In addition, they mark a 6 percent increase over the Q2 2012 figures of $8.72 billion.

Of the report, IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg said, “These historic investments in interactive point to the strong results that marketers are receiving from digital marketing. It is a highly effective medium for interacting and engaging consumers, who are no longer passive, but are active participants in contemporary media online, through social media, and on-the-go with mobile.”

Will this growth continue? Will native advertising contribute to it? Mobile? Thoughts?

So everyone’s been yapping about how great social media is and why you should implement it to better your relationship with your customers. Well, what about the most important customer of all? You. Yea, you. That’s right. Because with no you, there’s no them and without them, there’s no you. OK, that’s confusing. Tanslation: Social media is great for serving your customer’s needs but it’s also great for serving your own internal needs.

You’ve probably heard the term social business. It’s just another fancy term the gurus use to describe a business that has fully embraced the benefits of social media for the betterment of their business. Another term is Enterprise Social Business. Buzzword bingo aside, here’s an informative guide from Clearvale that will explain how the use of social media internally can save time, money and help you work smarter.

Download this whitepaper now to learn how you can put the transformative (oops, sorry about that buzzword bingo) powers of social media to work inside your business. Or just forward it to a client and get a gold star for the day. But, really. Download it. Now. Go ahead. Click. Right now. Click. OK? Good. You’ll thank us later.

The internet was supposed to solve everything, right? Brands could direct all their customers to the web where every last query could be answered without need for expensive human customer support. Sadly, that isn’t always the case.

Customers associate the Internet with speed and convenience. They expect to visit a brand’s website, find what they’re looking for and purchase the product just moments later. This is the expectation. But what happens when a your brand’s website fails to provide an efficient customer experience?

According to a survey in the Forrester Report entitled “Websites That Don’t Support Customers Waste Millions,” the results could cause your business significant loss. When customers can’t find what they need online, they resort to other channels:

– About 75% use a more expensive channel (typically a company’s customer phone service) to complete the sale or product research.
– 17% took their business elsewhere to competitors.
– 11% gave up on the shopping experience entirely.

Download this report now and arm yourself with the facts you need to support they budget you need to insure your website isn’t losing millions and hemorrhaging customers to your competition.

While content marketing may be the buzzword dujour, there’s some credence to the notion. After all, people need the right information at the right time when they are researching and deciding what to buy.

In this Yesler whitepaper, part of the Adrants whitepaper series, you will find out how to map your content to the needs and roles of your prospects as they move through the purchasing cycle. In the whitepaper, you will learn:

– How to use content to spark an ongoing conversation with prospective buyers
– How to determine what kinds of content best meet the needs of your prospective buyers
– The importance of buyer personas and communication channel preferences
– What pitfalls to avoid as you create content for your own content marketing efforts

Download the whitepaper now and learn how to properly develop and map your content marketing to the needs of your customers.

Sadly, many customer loyalty programs lack differentiation, target too broad an audience or lack an overarching strategy. In this Forrester whitepaper, part of the Adrants whitepaper series, nine actionable methods of using customer intelligence and data to improve loyalty program effectiveness are presented.

Download this whitepaper now to see how you can improve the effectiveness of your customer loyalty programs.

Sharing it’s up to the minute Cyber Monday shopping metrics, IBM has pegged this year’s Cyber Monday sales up 24.1 percent through 12PM EST today. Contributing to that figure are several mobile metrics: 22.4 percent of consumers used a mobile device to shop, 12 percent of purchases where made using a mobile device and the iPhone tops all devices used to shop with an 8.7 percent share.

If you haven’t heard of real time bidding, or RTB, you need to. First, let us explain. When a user heads to a webpage and it starts loading, the siite automaticallly sends out a bid request to tens of hundreds of potential advertisers (on an RTB network) saying, “We’ve got this user who is 30, Indian, male and based in New Jersey, US, and recently searched for return air tickets to Delhi, opening a page on our site. How much are you willing to bid for being the only ad on this page?” Within about 100 milliseconds the publisher gets automated bids from different advertisers which are then analyzed to figure out the highest bidder and the brands being advertised. The winner is automatically alerted by the publisher site and the ad is published. Nifty, huh?

Over the last year and a half, Quantcast has worked towards definining the rules of this new online ad buying process. They have found that RTB campaigns perform quite well however, they have learned that many of the original assumptions and hypotheses shared throughout the industry have turned out to be wrong.

This Quantcast whitepaper, part of the Adrants whitepaper series, is the first in a series that will explain what has been learned in the world of real time bidding. Download this whitepaper now to discover the six reasons why some perfectly reasonable hypotheses of RTB 1.0 have turned out to be flawed and learn how to do RTB right.

A recent study conducted by content sharing company Tynt found copy and paste comprises 82 percent of all content sharing, 4.5x more than share buttons. Among other findings, the data revealed copy and paste is the most prevalent method by which users share text, images, and URLs across the web.

Of course it should be noted Tynt is a company that “enables premium publishers and content creators to capitalize on the most common sharing method on the web: copy and paste.”