President Obama has been busy during his first 100 days in office — confronting an economic crisis, addressing rising healthcare costs, promoting clean energy innovation and restoring confidence. Nearly two out of three Americans approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president. We decided to measure web chatter volume for the biggest issues during President Obama’s first 100 days. Not surprisingly, chatter around the stimulus package led all topics overall. But at the moment, healthcare is the hottest topic.

As astonished as we’ve been to watch Twitter’s rise in 2009 to almost 2% of the conversation share on the web, swine flu has jumped past almost every other hot topic in the last week. This certainly gives viral marketing a new meaning.

2009 is quickly becoming the year of the short attention span. Thanks in part to Twitter’s recent skyrocketing popularity, Blip.fm has been steadily increasing in buzz since its launch in July 2008. The site offers users the ability to build playlists on the fly by playing songs and attaching short accompanying messages (150 characters or less, of course).

Last.fm offers vastly more functionality than Blip.fm, including music recommendations based on songs you like. But who has time for anything more than a blip these days?

Do you think Blip.fm buzz will surpass Last.fm?

Land Rover recently became the first brand to execute a national Twitter campaign to promote its newest models’ debuts at the 2009 New York Auto Show.

The campaign promoted hashtag #LRNY in out-of-home venues like billboards and taxi TVs to spread the word of Land Rover’s Twitter efforts.

Was it a success? The campaign cost Land Rover nearly nothing and generated a significant increase in buzz leading up to the New York Auto Show.

According to a recent study, the best way to get Internet users to visit your website or follow your brand is brand mentions, not banner ads, pop-up ads, e-mail offers and sponsored links. So increased word-of-mouth chatter could be considered one form of success for Land Rover.

But what were people saying? Sentiment around Land Rover was largely positive during the spike in chatter, with words like “best” and “luxurious” appearing high in the results.

Digging a bit deeper, we wanted to identify the top influencers on Land Rover during the first few weeks in April. Using Social Radar, we created the visual ecosystem below showing some of the most influential sources and how they connected.

The visual is based on metrics such as the ratio of content matching the Land Rover query, post frequency, inbound link frequency, outbound link frequency, and more. For additional info, Social Radar users can click on any of the bubbles to see stats.

Nearly 45% of Internet users will visit a social network at least once per month, according to eMarketer, but social network advertising represents just 5% of overall online ad dollars. Should more companies follow Land Rover’s lead?

More importantly, can Land Rover use excitement around the campaign to sustain relationships with customers online?

What do you think of when you hear the word apple? A fruit that keeps the doctor away? George Washington? Pie? Nope.

How about consumer electronics. Welcome to 2009.

Brands often become ubiquitous words for their products, like Kleenex facial tissues. But who would have predicted 50 years ago that the fruit kids brought their teachers as a gift would be replaced in our language by a brand name?

There are hundreds of types of apples that can be used in countless recipes, but the topic cloud for the word “apple” (pulled from millions of Internet conversations over the last year) shows that technology-related words were far more prominent than recipe or baking.

To build the trend chart below, we used a massive query including all Apple products (iPod, iPhone, Macbook, Mac, etc.), software (iWork, iLife, etc.) as well as words associated with Apple (technology, software, computer, apps, features, developers, etc.) compared to all other apple-related content (excluding Big Apple, Fiona Apple, etc.).

What are some other examples of successful branding? What do you think of first when you hear the word windows?

Television host/Emmy Award winner/philanthropist/billionaire Oprah Winfrey @oprah has decided to send her first tweet during live TV today.

Ashton Kutcher @aplusk will be be Oprah’s guest, discussing today’s win in the race to a million followers over CNN @cnnbrk and Britney Spears @britneyspears.

What does it mean for the future of social media? TechCrunch wonders if soccer moms will take over the service.

Check out the trend chart below. Even someone with a reputation as established as Oprah’s — one of the most powerful people in the world — is trending up in chatter the last few days thanks to Twitter. Her buzz should continue to rise today after the show airs. The topic cloud below represents topics of conversation on the web related to Oprah over the last two days.

Social media is evolving. Kutcher gets it. “For one person to actually have the ability to broadcast to as many people as a major media network, sort of signifies the turning of the tide from tradition news outlets to social news outlets,” Kutcher said in a YouTube video.

It’s exciting news. As Brian Solis said in his blog, we participate in social media to express ourselves. We become media. We become influencers. Solis goes on to discuss the potential of social media to empower individuals moving forward.

What’s next? Googlezon may be here before 2014.

National fast food chain Domino’s pizza is facing a PR nightmare after trouble-making employees intentionally used disgusting, unsanitary measures to prepare food. The employees, who have since been fired and could face charges, recorded the video with one purpose in mind—spreading the video across the Internet by posting it on YouTube.

The damaging video and discussion spread rampantly across the web in the last few days, tarnishing the reputation of Domino’s Pizza. We decided to measure just how bad the effects were for the Domino’s brand.

The chart below shows the overall chatter throughout the last week, along with the total positive and negative conversations within this chatter. Will the Domino’s brand be able to recover soon? Domino’s has posted an apology video on YouTube and created a Twitter account to respond to customers directly online. If you were Domino’s CEO, how would you respond to this crisis?

Even without a dramatic Tiger Woods comeback victory at Augusta National on Sunday, Masters Tournament web chatter nearly doubled in 2009. The trend chart below compares chatter around the 2008 and 2009 Masters Tournaments.

The @The_Masters Twitter account rapidly accumulated 41,442 followers throughout the tournament this weekend. The Masters Facebook page has 42,811 fans. The Masters iPhone app released April 1 is currently the #4 most downloaded free app on iTunes.

We’ll also be monitoring buzz on the NBA playoffs over the next month after TNT announced that Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith and other on-air talent will be Twittering during games beginning April 14.

It seems that Twitter is changing the world 140 characters at a time. We reported last week that Twitter was the most social brand in the month of March. Twitter experienced 76.8% growth during March as everybody from Snoop Dogg to Fortune 500 companies to local churches to President Obama is tweeting on a regular basis. Here are just a few headlines this week:

Twitter Passes New York Times
Is Twitter Killing RSS?
AT&T uses Twitter during service outage
New York church brings Good Friday to Twitter

Think about that for a minute. Twitter is surpassing one of the most established publications in the world, eliminating the need for feed readers, providing reliable communication during an outage for one of the biggest cellular service providers, and even spreading the gospel.

Rainn Wilson says he has more twitter followers than the population of Tulsa after just a few months on Twitter.

John Mayer says he was lamenting the loss of fan mail in the tech age until he realized Twitter is the next best thing.

Golfweek says Twitter is the biggest trend to hit the Masters since the green jacket.

Ad Age says that advertising agencies need to think more Twitter and less TV.

How has this micro-blogging company with only 30 employees surpassed behemoth Google in buzz within the last few months? Check out the chart below to see how Twitter has surged past big names like iPhone, Facebook and even Google in web chatter.

Nearly 1 out of every 100 online conversations mentions Twitter. And only a fraction of the population has actually realized the power of Twitter. Where is its ceiling?

We received a lot of feedback on yesterday’s Social Radar Top 50 (March 2009) post and wanted to provide some additional thoughts. A brand is a promise; a collective of perceptions. Our Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands list was calculated based on overall conversation volume, including millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts. To determine our top 50 brands, we aggregated a massive list of thousands of the words and brands on the web during March 2009, then conducted further analysis to rank the results. Our list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during March 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

We did not base our list on number of searches, which you could easily do using Google Trends. We measured conversations and web chatter. If you’re a brand manager, do you want to know who’s searching for your brand? Absolutely. Do you also want to know how many people are talking about your product online? Absolutely. If you need to do some home repair, say, fix your cabinets, you’ll probably start with a Google search. But are you going to blog about your experience? Probably not unless it’s extraordinarily good or bad.

We also did not base our list on revenues. The Business Week / Interbrand list of top global brands for 2008 is evaluated based on how much the brand is likely to earn for the company in the future. Interbrand uses a combination of analysts’ projections, company financial documents, and its own qualitative and quantitative analysis to arrive at a net present value of those earnings.

Coke and McDonald’s are both on Interbrand’s top 10 list, but both brands were outside of our top 50. Social media doesn’t necessarily correlate to market share. How often are you blogging about the Coke you bought from the vending machine? On the other hand, technology is always advancing and people often chat or post about new updates and features. Check out the chart below comparing chatter for Coke, McDonald’s and iPhone throughout March 2009.

There are many reasons why products have large market share. Microsoft products are still predominately used in many corporate settings, and in some cases employees at those corporations might prefer to use Apple products but aren’t given the choice. Apple’s market share has increased dramatically in the last few years. Who knows if Apple will surpass Microsoft in the future, but they are generating more buzz than Microsoft on the web thanks to passionate Mac and iPhone users.

Social media is evolving. Companies are just now beginning to hire social media strategists to interact with consumers. Social media is still a low priority for many large corporations because of lack of perceived ROI. So they are still experimenting with ways to become part of the conversation. Companies that can create real-time interaction and involvement with their customers will be best prepared to succeed in the new media world. How can companies capitalize on or increase online buzz? Will it translate to increased revenue in the future?