Last week Eva Longoria participated in a Pepsi NEXT “Drink It to Believe It” promotional campaign in New York City’s Times Square, by giving out free samples of Pepsi NEXT, which the company says has 60% less sugar than regular Pepsi.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversation online.

Eva Longoria mentions within Pepsi Next chatter

Eva Longoria was mentioned in more than 25% of all Pepsi NEXT conversations online following the event.

Pepsi NEXT conversation sentiment

Conversations around Pepsi NEXT are currently 79% positive. Pepsi’s new campaign in which Funny or Die improv comedians select fans to impersonate trying the new soft drink was mentioned in 17% of conversations, and those mentions were 100% positive. The comedians will create mock videos impersonating the fans based on their Facebook profiles.

Pepsi NEXT content distribution

Approximately 41% of Pepsi NEXT mentions are currently coming via Twitter, and 49% via blogs.

For further analysis, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

Pope Benedict XVI is bringing a segment of his daily papal message to Twitter, beginning Ash Wednesday, Feb. 22. According to a Vatican Radio blog post, some Catholics view Lent as a time to volunteer, give something up or study the Bible, while others have abandoned the season.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online.

Lent mentions

Even with more social media channels than ever and overall social media usage exploding, both ‘Lent’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’ mentions have declined online each year since 2008.

Content distribution

Since 2008, 47% of Lent mentions came via blogs, and 40% via Twitter.

Can The Pope’s Twitter campaign help save Lent?

Virgin America is using Twitter to get the word out for a 24-hour sale that will give some of its proceeds to a cancer charity. We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around Virgin American online.

Virgin America buzz

Virgin American mentions increased 4X thanks to the sale promotion. However, there was an even larger spike in mentions on August 4. We used Social Radar to investigate further.

Virgin America conversations August 4, 2011

Turns out, Virgin America celebrated its fourth anniversary with another Twitter-themed scavenger hunt promotion at AT&T Park in San Francisco.

NBC’s hit show “The Voice” aired its finale this week, naming Javier Colon the show’s first ever winner. ”The Voice” incorporated social media into its strategy from the beginning, building a Twitter presence into the broadcast with hashtag #thevoice, and included live tweets on air during the show. We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online.

The Voice vs. American Idol

We measured conversations around upstart program “The Voice” vs. television behemoth “American Idol.” Thanks to a strong social media presence, “The Voice” generated more chatter than American Idol on its April 26 premiere, even as competition tightened on “Idol.”

Javier Colon vs. Scotty McCreery

We also measured chatter around “American Idol” winner Scotty McCreery vs. “The Voice” winner Javier Colon. McCreery generated more chatter following his “Idol” win.

So it appears that “The Voice” did a great job of generating conversations around the show overall, rather than individual contestants.

NBC is already planning to broadcast an episode of “The Voice” following the Super Bowl in February 2012. Will it help save the fledgling network? Will we see more shows incorporating Twitter into broadcasts to boost audience participation?

On Tuesday, July 13 Old Spice kicked off what some called the biggest short term social media success to date. The Old Spice ‘Your Man’ campaign, created by Wieden + Kennedy, included 183 videos featuring Isaiah Mustafa personally replying to consumers on YouTube.

The campaign yielded astonishing results:

• 130 million YouTube views
• +118% Facebook fans
• +227% YouTube subscribers
• +2800% Twitter followers

The campaign was groundbreaking in many ways. Wieden’s global interactive creative director Iain Tait told Fast Company they had a team of editors and creatives creating the ads in real time. And the tactic clearly established a strong community footprint for Proctor & Gamble’s Old Spice brand.

Overall conversation sentiment was 86% positive.

But interestingly, Isaiah Mustafa was the most mentioned related to the topic. No words directly related to Old Spice’s products even appear in the topic cloud.

How did the online buzz translate to sales? An Ad Age article reported: for the four weeks ending June 13, Old Spice’s sales were up 106% from the prior-year period. But, sales of Gillette body wash, backed by buy-one-get-one-free coupons and by their own TV ads were up a lot more, 277% (though it’s by far a smaller brand in the category).

And while Old Spice enjoyed a noticeable spike in the Body Wash conversation over Nivea, Gillette, Dove and Axe during the weeks surrounding the campaign, overall online chatter has leveled off among all competitors in the category.

Can Old Spice keep the conversation going? And what will Old Spice do with the online community footprint it has built to convert the fans and followers into loyal customers?

In addition, what’s a Facebook fan really worth? With answers ranging from $136.38 to $3.60, Forrester research says: zero, unless and until the brand does something to create value with Facebook fans.

How can other brands learn from this campaign to create other successful real-time marketing campaigns?

Food critics, mom’s, physicians and personal trainers are cringing at the thought of this new ‘sandwich’ Kentucky Fried Chicken is positioning to consumers. The Double Down is a one-of-a-kind sandwich that features two thick and juicy boneless white meat chicken filets (Original Recipe® or Grilled), two pieces of bacon, two melted slices of Monterey Jack and pepper jack cheese and Colonel’s Sauce. So meaty, there is no room for a bun.

While we’re all aware of bacon’ new found popularity, and the purported ability of free will,  this new KFC menu item has got peoples’ stomachs turning.

Since the news spread, a heavy influx of conversations have sprouted up all around the interwebs. Most topics maintained high relations to the sandwich itself, but as some time passed, much of the chatter looked to target & revolve around the KFC brand specifically.

Overall sentiment shows a fairly level playing field with both negative and positive remarks claiming about half of the references. This is interesting as most people are basing these decisions entirely without ever having sampled the new treat.

Here’s a word cloud showing more popular terms associated with related posts. From this we can tell that people like the fact that the new sandwich includes bacon and that a heart attack as a direct result of eating this sandwich is not so bad.

Over the past week, Double Down has appeared as a trending topic on Twitter. This being said, it’s no surprise that it reported the highest amount of related activity. And, as more talk about the sandwich continue to engulf the internet, food bloggers & critics everywhere will have no choice but to succumb reader demands and scarf one of these babies down (then write about it). So, I’m sure we can expect to see blog coverage increase.

In the mean time, its rounding in on that lunch hour. What to eat, what to eat….

Last week, the U.S. House passed very new, very controversial bill over health-care. This new legislation transforms rules governing the medical industry to ensure that tens of millions of uninsured Americans get medical coverage. While the topic is blatant big talk on television and in the papers, it’s still hard to get a grasp on how ‘we the people’ are actually reacting to this historical milestone. To gain better insight as to how the public actually feels, we look turn to the trusty internet & social media to provide us with some answers.

First, lets look at overall buzz. Below we see that there were over 30,000 posts in the days around the date the reform was signed into law. Obviously, people were very opinionated on the topic and felt the need to say so on the internet. Next, lets look at content.

This word cloud shows the most frequent terms associated with the posts, and are then classified by sentiment. Green depicts phrases with highly positive sentiment, red shows negative references, and grey lists neutral ones. As usual with government battles, the Democrats and Republicans find themselves in a battle.

Peeping into overall user sentiment, Social Radar tells us that a hefty 59% of posts directly related to the health-care reform were positive.

Here we see the most popular words associated with each emotion, along with the percentage of posts the terms appeared. We are able to dissect and determine the underlying issues that the public is conveying on the social web (Turns out that a lot of it has to do with the country’s deficit).

So the million dollar question that I’m sure everyone knows the answer to. Where are these conversations happening?

And you guessed it. Twitter was the favorite platform, with blogs falling into 2nd place. What do you think about all this? Feel free to leave a comment.

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.

Earlier this year, Toyota announced a series of recalls for many of their most popular models. The uproar in media has definitely impacted Toyota sales, not to mention their overall reputation as America’s top selling auto brand. So what did Toyota do to manage this crisis? They took to the world of social media. Now to answer the question that everyone is dying to know: is it working?

Here we see the rise in social media activity from the end of 2009 to present day. The number of raw posts has quadrupled, hitting a high point of nearly 120,000 posts in a single day. Today’s biggest related news: The Run Away Prius.

Looking at sentiment, to the left we see an analysis of how people felt about Toyota pre-incident. To the right, you can see the influx of negativity as it increases about 30%. And it doesn’t seem to be calming down one little bit.

Above is an illustration of sentiment over time. As you can see, the red line (which depicts negativity) has yet to show a distinct decline, meaning that people are still upset and Toyota needs to try harder at resolving these issues. Hmm.. now if only they could figure out where to start…

By looking at this classification of buzz, it looks like they should start with Twitter as it is pulling in the biggest portion of the traffic. Toyota has a big following on Twitter whether they’re direct followers or not. It’s time for Toyota to accelerate and start reaching out one to one.

As everything on the internet becomes social, is it only inevitable that all of your personal information and private life matters will become available as a public offering? Would you give your 5,000 Twitter followers access to your checking account statements? There’s a new social network in town, in the form of a microblog, that is positioning their service as “A fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying.” Blippy is stirring up some heated discussions on the internet and we used Social Radar to see what people are saying about this new social platform.

Blippy launched their private beta last week and got instant negative reactions as news spread through coverage from popular blogs TechCrunch and the NY Times.

With just over 30% of all related posts emitting negative emotion people don’t seem to think that Blippy is a very good basis for a microblog.

As Blippy is still only in beta, it will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people gain access to the tool. Have any of you tried it yet? What do you think of Blippy? Let us know!