After announcing his “Decision” to join the Miami Heat on July 8, 2010 in a much maligned hour-long ESPN spectacle, many have speculated that LeBron James went from one of the most loved to the most hated NBA players overnight.

James faced further criticism last week after taking out a full-page newspaper ad in the Akron Beacon Journal thanking his hometown of Akron, but not mentioning Cleveland, where he played basketball for seven years.

We decided to run a sentiment chart on LeBron James to compare positive and negative sentiment over the course of 2010. After being consistently near 80% positive throughout the NBA season, negative chatter is about to overcome positive chatter for the first time. Will the trend continue once the season starts? If so, how will James react to being a villain this season after being a hero most of his career?

With only one rose ceremony remaining on one of ABC’s most popular TV shows, The Bachelorette, we decided to run some analysis on the final two contestants remaining. After Frank’s dramatic choice to leave the show for his ex-girlfriend last week, Ali must now choose between Chris and Roberto.

We conducted sentiment analysis on online chatter for both remaining contestants. Nearly 59% of online posts about Chris were positive and only 39% were negative. On the other hand, only 43% of posts about Roberto were positive, while 57% were negative. Will Ali agree with America and choose Chris?

It’s that time of year again. Tonight, a new American Idol is crowned. We used Social Radar to predict the winner. Based on these results, we’re predicting your next American Idol will be:

Lee DeWyze!

We all know that Canada triumphed this past Sunday when they beat the US 3-2 for the 2010 Olympic gold medal in hockey (here’s a video to clue you in if you didn’t know). The game itself was very intense and I found myself sitting in an airport refreshing my iphone browser trying to keep track of the game, and I don’t even care about hockey! I was more interested in seeing the impact this North American civil war was imposing  in social media.

Numbers peaked on game day, cumulatively reporting upwards of over 9,000 blog, news and forum posts directly related to this final game.

Microblogging activity like that on Twitter took up nearly 60% of the chatter with numerous hashtags, RTs and banter reproducing over the internet.

It could have been the fact this is the first time in many years that anyone has doubted Canada to win the gold in hockey, but it is surprising that even with all the drama revolved around this year’s winter Olympics (the luge guy dying, the ice skater’s mother passing, etc), that hockey (as a gaming division) prevailed more talked about than any of the other categories.

Its interesting to see what sparks peoples’ wires and the issues / stories that push us to post on the internet. From the past weekend’s events, I can predict that hockey will eventually tower over football. Hey, you never know, right?

Earlier this week NBC unleashed some strong arm on Conan O’Brien, threatening to push The Tonight Show to a later time slot following The Jay Leno Show in an effort to pump up Leno views. This rearrangement upset many Conan fans and the repercussions are being felt in social media.

In the past week, posts referencing the two late-night stars has nearly tripled, with huge bursts regarding Conan peaked today when he announced his refusal to play nice with NBC.

Based on this sentiment analysis of both hosts, we can see that Leno produces higher negative sentiment amongst users. Diving into categories, people are a-Tweet voicing their concerns.

With 88% of buzz hailing from Twitter, it’s no mystery that Conan O’Brien is the crowd favorite. Related hashtags (#TeamConan) are infiltrating my feed and I feel like I’m reliving the whole “Twilight Team Edward/Jacob” craze that took over a month ago. Do you think NBC execs will finally smarten up and start giving the people what they want?

The 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 all of 2008 and 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

This year has certainly been interesting. Several new brands made their way to the mainstream making our 2009 Top 50 list, such as Kindle, Amazon’s hit e-book reader, and Android, Google’s mobile OS that is spreading onto smartphones like wildfire. Interestingly, Samsung and Nokia took a big hit this year, as sexier smartphones such as iPhones and Android-powered devices from HTC and Motorola gain more attention.

The list certainly shows that 2009 was the year of Social Media. Twitter moved ahead of Google to take the number 1 spot, while Facebook and MySpace made significant leaps over big brands as well. Most video game related brands were down this year as well, including Sony, Wii, Xbox, and Nintendo. It also appears TV brands all jumped this year including Disney, MTV, Fox, BBC, CNN, ESPN, and ABC.

Download the PDF:

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.

Social Radar Screenshot:

Questions or comments? Twitter me @adamcoomes.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, you have probably been hearing about the ad battle between AT&T and Verizon that is paralleling a political campaign with constant attacking on both sides. It all started when Verizon decided to make a silly spin on iPhone “There’s an App for That” ads by making a “There’s a Map for That” ad, exploiting AT&T’s poor 3G network coverage. To fight back, AT&T decided to sue Verizon, leading to a war of attack ads back and forth that has no end in sight.

What does the consumer do in this situation? Sit back and watch in amusement? Take sides? One thing’s for certain - they’ve been talking, and Social Radar is showing us some interesting insight. Let’s take a look.

Now let’s take a look at the sentiment after the ad battle.

The sentiment appears to have effected AT&T the most severely, appearing to be a success for Verizon. But, both brands gained at least some negativity. Though this is good news for Verizon, let’s take a look at this from another perspective.

Below is a trend chart from September 1st, 2009 through today of Droid Mentions (blue line) versus Commercial/Ad Mentions (red line) within Verizon chatter.

What’s concerning here is that as soon as Verizon began to run these AT&T attack ads, chatter around their beloved Droid devices has dramatically decreased. We can see very clearly that consumers are losing focus and beginning to chat more about their commercials than the very ammunition they are using to sell against AT&T and the iPhone.

It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out. Are attack ads a good way to point out flaws of competitors or does it simply lose their consumers’ focus?

Last week, the world received news of Tiger Woods being hospitalized with serious injury from a car accident. The world felt sorry for Tiger, wished him well, and waited in anticipation for news of his recovery. This week, the world has a different perspective. As details began to spill, the world had learned that his car accident was the result of Tiger fleeing from his wife as she chased after him, bashing his car with a golf club from news of his unfaithful behavior. How did the public react? How has the sentiment changed? Let’s do some research.

First, let’s compare the topics of conversation around Tiger Woods before news broke of his alleged affairs.

Tiger Woods Topics (Before News Broke of Affairs):

Tiger Woods Topics (After News Broke of Affairs):

Tiger Woods Sentiment Before Accident:

Tiger Woods Sentiment After News Of Affairs:

We then go on to measure which topics were being discussed the most around Tiger Woods chatter. Below are some of the topics we analyzed. We included some of the hot topics, including the names of potential mistresses being mentioned.

We also wanted to take a quick peek at the Nike. Let’s see if there’s any real effect or association of this negativity with their brand.

Tiger Woods mentions within Nike chatter

Nike Sentiment within Tiger Woods conversations

Nike BEFORE:

Nike AFTER:

Nike’s negativity did increase this past week, but not significantly. We can certainly conclude that Nike’s brand wasn’t severely affected by this mess. However, Tiger Woods’ brand certainly has been. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and how this continues to affect his brand in the coming weeks.

Yesterday’s MadMen season 3 finale struck up some intense Tweeting on a typically calm Sunday evening. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t ruin it for you by writing out a synopsis, I will however, let you in on some social media conversations about this drastic turn of events.

Postings reached a high on Sunday as people were immediately hopping onto the internet to give their input, blog their hearts out, as well as feed into some Twitter action where multiple hashtags (#madmen) were forming. In my personal opinion, I think this was probably the best episode to date. A lot of stuff went down and it seems that many of the characters are beginning to form new paths for themselves. Looking at sentiment:

A whopping 83% of people totally dug the changes (which I won’t mention in case you haven’t seen it yet). If the suspense is killing you, this word cloud will hint you in on the happenings…

Lots of Wow’s popped in, along with talk about some used-to-be-familiar-but-went-away characters like the lovely Joan & infamous Sal.

So where is this going? Well it’s all about Twitter right now. I’m sure that as next season approaches, conspiracy theories and nonsense will come to surpass as it can be expected that leaks and spoilers won’t be able to keep their secrets held ’till the start of Season 4. Can’t wait!

On Friday October 2, 2009, President Obama flew to Copenhagen, Denmark to urge the International Olympic Committee to pick his hometown of Chicago to be the host of the 2016 Olympic games. Accompanying the President included first lady, Michelle Obama, as well as talk show host Oprah Winfrey.

We used Social Radar to research the 2016 Olympic games chatter.

We decided to pull a chart of positive, negative, and conflicting chatter over October 1 to October 3, 2009.

Let’s also take a look at the context of the chatter from the October 1 to October 3, 2009.

The data clearly shows that the overall sentiment of Rio de Janerio being chosen to host the 2016 Games as positive (as you can see from the words highlighted in green).  However, the news that Chicago was cut first round was devastating to many as you can see by the volume of negative words used.

We also decided to look at the positive and negative conversation trend (green and red lines) correlating with conversation volume (the bars) from the month leading up to the announcement to the day following the announcement.

As you can see, there was a significant amount of positive chatter in the month leading up to the announcement. However, on October 2 we see the negative trend line increase while the positive trend line decrease. This change in trends could be due to the mixed emotions felt by many. Sadly, there will be no Olympic games for Chicago in the near future.