The Quaker oat man, known as “Larry” is getting a makeover as part of a wider effort by PepsiCo to reinvigorate the brand globally. Customers associate the brand with heritage, trust and quality, and people associate oatmeal with energy and health choices, says Patrick Rowell, director of strategy for Hornall Anderson, Quaker’s brand-design firm.

The design firm trimmed Larry’s hair, made him five pounds lighter, removed his double chin, and show his shoulders, which makes him seem stronger and more vibrant.

Old logo:

New logo:

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around Quaker online.

Logo mentions within Quaker conversations

The new logo is currently being mentioned in 18% of Quaker conversations.

Quaker buzz

Overall Quaker buzz has been unaffected by the new logo so far.

Quaker sentiment

Conversations around Quaker have been an average of 80% positive this month, but spiked to 96% positive today.

Content analysis

Approximately 44% of Quaker mentions came via Twitter, 43% via blogs. Coupons with the term “free” offer appear in 33% of Quaker conversations and have 100% positive chatter online.

For further analysis, visit http://infegy.com/socialradar.

Facebook launched its Timeline feature for brand Pages on Wednesday this week. At New York’s fMC (Facebook Marketing Conference) this week, the company said that following brands on Facebook is no different than following friends and family. The new brand pages introduce a suite of new advertising tools. Companies like Redbull have already started taking advantage of the new layout and features.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around Facebook online.

Facebook buzz

Facebook was mentioned in 3.6% of ALL Internet conversations on Wednesday this week.

Facebook sentiment

Conversations around Facebook are currently 67% positive.

Facebook conversation topic cloud

Facebook Pages are appearing in 26% of all Facebook mentions, and conversations are 85% positive.

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s new Page Timeline features? How will the changes affect the way you advertise?

Eli Manning and the New York Giants defeated Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in Sunday night’s Super Bowl 21-17. The game was seen by an average of 111.3 million people, the biggest audience in U.S. television history. We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online.

Super Bowl buzz

Super Bowl mentions more than doubled mentions in 2011, 2010 and 2009.

Super Bowl sentiment

Conversations around the Super Bowl were 77% positive. The game generated more chatter than the commercials — ‘Giants’ appeared in 12% of conversations, halftime performer ‘Madonna’ appeared in 7% of conversations, and upcoming movie ‘Avengers’ appeared in 3% of all Super Bowl conversations.

Content analysis

Approximately 99% of Super Bowl mentions yesterday and today came via Twitter. The event generated more real-time conversation than blog content. An average of 58% of Super Bowl mentions came via males. Ads such as the H&M commercial featuring David Beckham effectively engaged women in the Super Bowl conversation.

Brand Bowl

With advertising selling for record prices, which brands generated the most buzz for their buck? Doritos generated the biggest spike in conversation and the most mentions among advertisers. The Doritos ‘Sling Baby’ ad was rated highest by users on a USA Today poll.

Many advertisements featured Twitter hashtags this year. Which campaign do you think was most effective?

Did you watch Sunday’s Super Bowl XLV for the game or the commercials? The Green Bay Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers in an exciting game, but much of today’s talk around the water cooler has been about the ads.

Ad Age rated all of the Super Bowl XLV commercials. Watch all the commercials at www.foxsports.com/ads.

Consumers used blogs and social media sites to discuss ads in real time. The hashtag #brandbowl was the top trending topic on Twitter during the game.

We used Social Radar to run analysis around all major brands that advertised during the game.

Commercial chatter within Super Bowl conversations

The words commercial, ad, advertisement or brand were mentioned in 13.5% of Super Bowl conversations online yesterday and today.

Brand Mentions within Super Bowl Commercial Chatter

Of the brands that advertised during the Super Bowl, Chrysler was mentioned most often. The word Chrysler appeared in 4.49% of Super Bowl advertising chatter. Eminem, the pitch man in the Chrysler ad, as well as the Brisk tea ad, appeared in 3.9% of Super Bowl advertising chatter.  Chrysler generated buzz with a raw depiction of Detroit in its ad, as well as the new tagline “Imported from Detroit.”

Groupon was 2nd most often discussed brand, mentioned in 2.82% of Super Bowl advertising chatter.

Groupon Sentiment Trend

Groupon Sentiment Feb 6-7

Groupon generated negative headlines following its controversial commercial “spoof” of celebrity-endorsed public service announcements. Online conversations around Groupon, which were nearly 90% positive during the month of January, spiked to 60% negative today following the commercial.

Groupon Conversation Topic Cloud

Nearly every topic of conversation around Groupon today has been negative. The word ‘offensive’ appears in more than 5% of all Groupon conversations today.

Regardless of whether the conversations are positive or negative, Groupon generated a lot of publicity thanks to their controversial ad. Is there really no such thing as bad press?

In today’s economic climate, marketers are trying to do more with less by making more efficient media buys. The most cost efficient, and often most trusted form of media is word of mouth. Senior Forrester Research Analyst Jeremiah Owyang called word of mouth the holy grail of marketing.

Organizations like hospitals rely heavily on word of mouth to remain top of mind for patients choosing a health care institution for their treatment. Lee Aase from the Mayo Clinic presented at the Community 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on how the Mayo Clinic is using social media to share their message with the existing community and extend the reputation built over many decades through word of mouth.

As millions of new users continue to join and use Twitter, retweets are quickly becoming the most effective way to socially endorse a brand or comment. A retweet is repeating someone else’s quote or tweet on Twitter. Owyang’s blog post called retweets the core essence of viral content spreading, as the content of a retweet was so valuable and important to that user that he or she was willing to share it with their network. And Forrester research indicates that Twitter users are brand sensitive.

Retweets are one way to make measuring and monitoring word of mouth more tangible and accurate. Repeets.com, a new site launched this week by our own Adam Coomes, tracks the hottest and most retweeted tweets of the day, week and month, providing a snapshot view of the most shared tweets. Mesiab Labs has launched www.retweet.com, an online petition users can sign to endorse retweets with the hope of creating enough support that Twitter will make an official Retweet button.

The chart below shows the steady rise of retweet or RT references online. Check out the spike from April to May 2009. How is your brand using and measuring retweets?

Twenty years ago, when a customer had a bad experience and decided to complain, he told a few friends and that was that. Today, a customer can share a bad experience with millions of people instantly through blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools. And when that customer happens to be NBC Parks and Recreation star Aziz Ansari, people listen.

Ansari went to the AMC Theater in Burbank on May 11 to see Star Trek: The IMAX Experience. He sent out a tweet that night claiming he was charged an extra $5 for a slightly bigger screen and not the full IMAX experience. Ansari then wrote a blog post asking readers to boycott fake IMAX experiences at Regal and AMC Theaters.

Slashfilm made a post on Digital IMAX supporting Ansari. CHUD and New York Magazine followed suit. Within hours, Ansari tweeted that he also had the support of Deadline Hollywood, Fark, Buzzfeed, Rotten Tomatoes, Onion AV Club, CinemaBlend, Collider and more. His story made the Digg homepage with 2435 Diggs.

Richard Gelfond, CEO of IMAX, defended IMAX against Ansari’s rant and other blogs covering the issue. Though he seemed to brush off Ansari’s comments, saying, “The overwhelming majority of comments on that guy’s blog this morning, more than 90% of them, are vehemently disagreeing with him. And consumers are confirming this with their continued purchases of tickets.” Ansari blogged a response, asking others to share their experiences online.

How much impact can one person have? Check out the trend chart below measuring online chatter. Positive sentiment around IMAX was extremely high the week leading up to Ansari’s rant, with more than 80% positive chatter. Positivity has gone down sharply to 60% over the past two days, with negativity shooting up from less than 10% to nearly 40% of IMAX posts.

We also analyzed keywords around the word IMAX over the last few days. The word fake appeared in 8% and Ansari appeared in 5% of posts. Will the chatter lead to a decrease in customers? How do you think IMAX should respond? Is your brand prepared to handle the power customers have today?

The April 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 April 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during April 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 once again dominates the Top 50 list in April 2009. Already the hottest brand on our March list by a wide margin, Twitter accumulated an additional 10% in chatter in April.

Content sharing website Digg joined the Top 50 this month thanks in part to the April 2 launch of the DiggBar. Enterprise software company Oracle also joined the list with an increase in chatter due to its April 20 acquisition of Sun Microsystems. And as the NBA and NHL Playoffs heated up in April, the NHL joined the Top 50 while the NBA jumped 9 spots.

Dell dropped 23 spots this month as buzz around the March announcement of the new Dell Adamo faded. Kindle also dropped out of the Top 50 as hype around the Kindle 2 subsided.

Conversely, CNN jumped up 10 spots thanks to the race to a million Twitter followers with Ashton Kutcher. IBM also jumped four spots thanks to increasing focus on social media.

View the list below, or download the full 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.

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?

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?

Update 04/08/09: For more details on how we determine our ranking, view The new rules of branding

If sheer volume of conversation is any indication, Twitter is the hottest brand in the market. Twitter dominates a tech-heavy list of brands in our March 2009 Social Radar Top 50. The Social Radar Top 50 measures the most social brands by the number of unique topics of conversation. These brands are top of mind for consumers and bloggers today — Social Radar determined rankings according to the number of individual websites with at least one post about each brand to accurately capture the brand’s reach across the web.

The list below is based on overall conversation volume through the month of March 2009, including blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts. The +/- number represents the ranking change since February 2009.

For the full March 2009 list, download the PDF. Be sure to visit our Social Radar Top 50 page for access to each month’s results.

Questions? Comments? Tweet me: @adamcoomes