We were alerted by Social Radar that chatter volumes around Nestle and Kit-Kat specifically were rising by the minute. When we checked-in we found that the topic of the moment was Palm Oil.

We took a look at the actual chatter volumes for the Nestle company and we were staggered to see the trend below.

It was clear to us that something was going on here so we dug deeper.

Our conclusions were that Greenpeace had staged a video on Vimeo which you can find here and they had also changed their homepage to mimic the logo of the much- loved Kit-Kat chocolate bar.

The discussion had flowed out primarily across Nestles Facebook page and a Nestle employee was deleting Wall Posts at a serious rate.

We then took a look to see how this was effecting the sentiment towards the Kit Kat product and discovered that over the past couple of days the positive sentiment to a much-loved product has been rapidly falling through the floor as they are being associated with destroying rain forests for the plam oil used to create them and also being accused of potentially killing Orang-utans by virtue of this.

Whether true or not we are clearly seeing a hugely negative trend shift for not just Kit-Kat the product but Nestle as a house of brands.

The key here is to identify the influencial persons, engage with them and try to stop the rot from penetrating further into their business by being open and honest and using the social channels to drive back the potentially incorrect debate - that is if it is incorrect of course.

As the digital world continues to develop, companies are continuously thinking of ways to better target their consumer. From iPhones to smartphones, mobile campaigns are now becoming a focus for several companies. Large brands such as Nike, are now integrating mobile campaigns into their marketing efforts. Other organizations like the American Red Cross are using the power of technology and the development of mobile phones to help relief effort abroad. The American Red Cross has developed a Text 2Help campaign to help those devastated by the earthquake in Haiti.

Haiti is known to be one of the worlds most depressed and underdeveloped countries in the world. On January 12, 2010 a massive earthquake struck the country leaving mass devastation. The magnitude 7.0 quake damaged buildings throughout the capital leaving many feared injured and dead. In addition, the debris and collapsed bridges have made access to several areas extremely difficult.  However, the people of Haiti are not foreign to struggle. The country has experienced constant political battles, health crises, and environmental degradation throughout the years.  On a positive note, Haiti’s government is backed by the U.N. peacekeeping mission and many are moving fast to help those in need. The outpouring support of the general public as well as organizations like the American Red Cross have helped tremendously with the relief effort.

We took a look to see what the overall sentiment was regarding Haiti.

You can see that ultimately people have both positive things to say about the country but also realize how poor and sad this massive earthquake has left the people of Haiti.

If you would like to support the relief effort in Haiti, you can text “Haiti” to “90999″ and a $10 donation to the American Red Cross will be made! (Donations will be taken out of your next monthly bill)Participating carries include Alltel, AT&T, Sprint-Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon. 

Please join the many others and text to help!

Last week, the world was at the edge of their seats as they watched in horror, a giant balloon a drift in the sky. This giant balloon was thought to be holding 6 year old Falcon Heene. Thankfully, the story turned out to be complete nonsense. The opinions that people in social media have on the Heene family are not. This is a look at digital repercussions of this sad, sad, cry for attention.

Here’s a pretty picture of general topics of conversation. Looking at this word cloud, you get the jist of the story without ever having read or heard about Balloon Boy. Text highlighted in red appear with negative instances.

48% of all related posts about the “Balloon Boy” incident were not good. What do you expect when you get the entire state of Colorado riled up on the possibility that a child is drifting hundreds of feet in the air, unprotected.

And once again, microblogs take reign in traffic. If only Balloon Boy was old enough to have a Twitter account….

Last week the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that they would be presenting U.S. President Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” As expected, directly after the announcement, there was an influx in media coverage and reactions; here’s a look at what was going on in social media.

Blogs, tweets and comments piled up, with everyone giving their two cents on the happening. This next chart shows that a hefty 25% of related content felt negatively about Obama’s selection.

Once again, the majority of volume reigned from Twitter, where multiple hash tags were sprouting up around the conversations.

So what exactly are people saying?

Well, people are saying a lot of things, and to our convenience, Social Radar is able to categorize the conversations for our easy comprehension. Achievement and expectations set the tone for most of the chatter, but it is interesting to see that almost 4% of content is categorized into the term “price“, which in this case, is referring to possible repercussions of the designation of this award. Do you feel the U.S. will have to “pay” for anything? Keep a keen eye out on your Tweet feed.

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.

One of the biggest stories of the week has been Iranians’ use of social media to communicate with each other and the outside world during the Iran election crisis. Protesters used Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia and blogs to disseminate information and help people take action.

The Iran crisis has literally given journalistic power to the people, as individuals spread news of developing events in the country. Twitter users adopted the hashtag #CNNfail to proclaim that “new media” (individuals using Twitter) had provided better coverage than “old media” (CNN) throughout the early stages of the crisis.

We decided to use Social Radar to analyze and compare the reach of messages posted by individuals with low influence vs. high influence. Social Radar tracks influence based on the number of links to a specific blog or account. For example, most average Twitter users or bloggers would be considered low influence, while sites like Engadget or CNN would be considered high influence and major media news sources.

The chart below provides interesting results. We measured the number of posts over the last few weeks for low influencers vs. high influencers on the topic of Iran or Iran election. Iran election conversation among low influencers is spreading twice as quickly as conversation among high influencers. The Iran crisis has proven that individuals can report relevant news quickly. What does it mean for “old media” in the future? Will we continue to see more and more examples of individuals using social media to beat established journalists to news stories?

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.