In typical Apple fashion, leading up to the Worldwide Developers Conference 2009, no one outside of Apple had a clue what the new iPhone would be called, nor could they confirm with certainty that a new iPhone would even be announced. When they made the announcement during the keynote, everyone heard Apple call the device, “iPhone 3G S”. It was an odd decision for Apple to include a space between “3G” and “S”, as many search engines don’t even index the letter “S”. In fact, many people simply called it “iPhone 3GS”.

As Apple started to realize the issues with this decision, such as the fact that their new device developed two names, they decided to pull a switch-a-roo name change with no prior warning. Apple issued a press release on June 22 titled Apple Sells Over One Million iPhone 3GS Models.

Lots of bloggers, news sources, and others picked up on this name change and people followed the trend quite quickly. The chart below shows you just how quickly the Internet changed their spelling. Pretty fascinating.

Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy about an Austrian fashion journalist, opened to $14.2 million last Friday night. Then, the movie experienced a drastic decline in sales between Friday and Saturday, causing it to fall as much as $20 million short of some expectations for opening weekend.

Many experts speculated that negative word-of-mouth caused the sharp sales decline for Brüno, as social media sites like Twitter are enabling word-of-mouth to affect releases instantly. Time magazine said Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter, and that Friday is the new weekend when measuring box office success.

Brüno was a trending topic on Twitter throughout opening weekend. We decided to use Social Radar to analyze the sentiment of comments posted on Twitter throughout the last week.

Sentiment was overwhelmingly positive leading up to the opening, with more than 90% positive comments on July 6. But as the movie opening on July 10, the number of negative comments increased sharply, with almost 50% negative sentiment on opening weekend. Words like rotten, uncomfortable and gross appeared frequently throughout posts.

Twitter and other social media sites are empowering consumers to make more informed purchase decisions. With this new level of transparency and instant consumer reviews, product launches cannot hide behind marketing to tell the story.

As we discussed in our post about the angry United Airline customer who gained massive attention with his YouTube complaint, consumers are influencing each other directly more quickly and on a larger scale than ever before. How can companies maintain control of their brands in today’s transparent world?

Dave Carroll claimed that United Airlines broke his $3,500 guitar on a flight from Nova Scotia to Nebraska last year. His phone call and e-mail complaints over the next several months didn’t earn Carroll so much as a travel voucher.

So Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell, recorded a song about their misfortune called “United Breaks Guitars” and posted a video on YouTube, with a goal to achieve a million Web hits.

Upon seeing the video, United immediately contacted Carroll to make it right. Since being posted on July 6, the YouTube video has already had more than a quarter million views in only three days. The video earned a 5 star rating with more than 7,000 ratings and nearly 3,000 comments.

We used Social Radar to analyze web chatter on United over the last week. The trend chart below shows a dramatic spike in overall chatter in the days following the video post.

We also analyzed topics of discussion around United Airlines, and nearly every topic of conversation in the past few days has centered around Carroll and his broken guitar.

By ignoring Carroll’s e-mails and phone calls but responding to his YouTube video, is United encouraging customers to use social media outlets to complain publicly?

The June 2009 Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during June 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during May 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

Twitter held on to the top spot, though once again trending down this month. iPhone jumped two spots to #2 overall and Apple jumped three spots to #6 thanks to buzz around the iPhone 3G S release.

Firefox jumped 10 spots thanks to increased chatter leading up to its new Firefox 3.5 release, which was downloaded more than a million times within a few hours.

XBox jumped 5 spots to #11 overall after the Project Natal announcement at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Surprisingly, with both the Project Natal and Bing search engine announcements this month, overall Microsoft buzz only increased one spot to #9 overall.

CNN jumped 13 spots, due in large part to a steep surge surrouding the news of Michael Jackson’s death. MLB jumped eight spots as the baseball season heated up in the month of June.

Finally, HTC joined the Top 50 this month, with talk about its new widget-based HTC Hero Android smartphone announcement.

View the full list below, or download the PDF. For additional information about how you can analyze chatter sentiment to gauge positivity/negativity, view key words mentioned about your brand and identify key influencers, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

Questions or comments? Twitter me @adamcoomes.