Social Media has become the new buzzword of the ad world, with brands, marketers, and agencies rushing to establish themselves as respected resources on comprehension and implementation of the medium. It’s interesting to find that, as an extremely broad term, “social media” can be associated with a handful of key words.

Marketing was the most referenced, with a hefty 4.3 occurrences per post and infiltrating nearly 44% of all results. Twitter and Facebook trailed closely behind. Looking at this word cloud, it can be concluded that the majority of social media related to social media is directly related to using it as an advertising strategy. So how do people feel about this? Pretty good.

From my experiences of being indulged in social media marketing, all these feelings are pretty much inline. This next chart is pretty cool and shows where the content is coming from. Apparently, people tend to converse about Social Media through Twitter, so if you’ve got something interesting to interject, best get your @replies going.

Kanye West is no stranger in the land of social media and has never had an issue drawing attention to himself, especially online. Silly antics keep Kanye in the spotlight of the blog and twitter-verse. Whether or not he has any idea how his behavior is affecting him, I have no clue. I do, however, have insight as to how everyone else on the internet feels about his buffoonery.

I looked to my trusty friend Social Radar to provide some data on reactions to Kanye’s random lash at Taylor Swift at last Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards.  (Here on referred to as “the incident”)

I ran a basic analysis on Kanye, notice that 88% of the results referred to him positively. People liked him, using words like “best, good, beautiful, and sweet” in relation to him. But then “the incident” happened, and so did this change in sentiment:

Looks like Mr. West should’ve considered the outcome of his actions! In just one day, because of this one “incident”, Kanye’s loving following of social media influencers immediately took to center stage, blogging, uploading pirated video clips, and tweeting their hearts away. And they didn’t have anything nice to say:

Notice the change in percentage of the frequency of these negative terms referencing Kanye; they’re all up! Also notice that one of the frequent terms is a Twitter hashtag (#fail).

And look at the role Twitter played in the “incident”. During VMA weekend, Twitter activity related to Kanye trended to increase nearly 50%! Everyone scurried to get their 140 character blurbs out. While no one can control what Kanye West decides to do with his public facing time, we sure can report on the effects they have on the online social scape.

On the heels of Apple’s Sept. 9 Rock and Roll event, we decided to analyze conversation share around some of the big announcements.

The Nano made big news at the event with the announcement of its new built in camera, 2.2-inch display, Genius mix capability and built-in FM radio.

The iPod Classic increased capacity to 160GB while keeping the price the same at $249.

The iPod Touch was advertised as the most affordable gateway to the App Store at $229, with no monthly fees. The keynote called the Touch Apple’s fastest growing product line and highlighted its gaming and pocket computing capability.

Apple also highlighted iTunes 9, which includes Genius mixes, home sharing, iTunes LP and a redesigned store layout.

We used Social Radar to measure share of voice for the following words within coversations about “iPod” within the last month: Touch, Nano, Classic, Shuffle, iPhone, Zune and iTunes.

Conversation around Nano spiked dramatically following the announcements, but Touch still holds the highest share among iPod conversations online.

iPhone and Touch hold the largest percentage of posts within the last 30 days at approximately 30% each, with Nano and iTunes each under 10%.

The August 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 August 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during August 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 holds its reign at number 1 yet again. Disney jumps 9 spots and Marvel joins the list as Disney’s acquisition of Marvel made huge news at the end of the month. Playstation launched 11 spots due to the introduction of the PS3 Slim with its long-awaited price drop. Xbox 360 also made news with the announcement of a price drop, sneaking it up 3 spots.

Also worth mentioning, the build-up of chatter momentum for the upcoming NFL season rose NFL 13 spots. Firefox and NASA both take a dive as natural fallout from their big announcements last month: NASA’s 40 year celebration of Apollo 11 and Firefox’s version 3.5 update.

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.