The September 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 September 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during September 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 falls a bit, but still takes top spot. LG’s new BL20 Chocolate helped LG jump 11 spots. NFL rises again this month as the NFL season heats up. MTV jumps 13 spots due to buzz around the MTV Video Music awards. AT&T’s announcement of MMS support on the iPhone raised AT&T’s position up 5 spots.

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.

Inspired by Autoblog’s monthly By the Numbers posts (such as this one), which detail automotive industry sales figures by brand for each month, we decided to build a list of the same brands, but looking instead at conversation volume, as we do in our Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands monthly posts. This list was built using the same methodology as our Top 50 list, but instead focusing purely on a list of 33 major automakers.

Ford has a solid lead here, which is not terribly surprising. As one of the world’s leading automakers for decades, Ford has emerged as the sole American automaker in position to survive without a government bailout. Ford has increased its emphasis on social media, with tactics like the Fiesta Movement campaign, an effort to generate buzz by giving 100 people Ford Fiestas and asking them to share their experiences online through blogs, tweets and Facebook updates leading up to its 2010 release. In addition, most of Ford’s online conversation revolves around the Ford brand, and much less in sub-brands such as Lincoln and Mercury. Brands like Chevrolet have to compete with themselves against similar sister brands such as Pontiac, and this hurts their rankings here.

Chrysler is up 5 places over last month, spurred largely by talks of its bankruptcy. We expect to see this continue throughout May, as their conversation over the last several days has surged well into first place. Also of note here is Pontiac, who moved up 10 places around talks of GM killing the brand.

Click to download the full PDF.