It’s been at center stage in recent tech news, with companies strategizing to develop the ultimate mixed reality application. Popular review website Yelp as well as long time mobile phone manufacturers Nokia have hopped on the augemented reality wagon, bringing major hype to this technology and stirring up some conversations in social media.

The question stands: How do we feel about these star-trek-like nodes of information overlays? Social Radar tells us this:

Since the beginning of July, a whopping 87% of posts, comments, and chatter around augmented reality has been positive. Notice that only a mere 2% of people are conflicted in their opinions. So can we assume that this will be the wave of the near future?

Perhaps. Looking at the sentiment trend graph, positive volume has been on a steady incline overall. Note that the hump in negativity that came mid September was brought on due to an announcement of an AR release by Nokia, that did not bode so well amongst consumers. Next we’ll take a look at actual feelings and overall concerns.

It’s confirmed. Augmented reality is COOL. So whats the “problem”? Apparently there are a few concerns, including integration of other phone features and overall functionality. People are scared that these apps will not improve their daily lives and instead complicate the sole purpose of the device in question. I guess you can say that there is a lot of doubt.

Want to get in on some AR discussions? Here are the hot beds.

Here’s an idea; an augmented reality app that pulls up social media analytics when a product, business, or person is over-layed. Haha!

Social Media has become the new buzzword of the ad world, with brands, marketers, and agencies rushing to establish themselves as respected resources on comprehension and implementation of the medium. It’s interesting to find that, as an extremely broad term, “social media” can be associated with a handful of key words.

Marketing was the most referenced, with a hefty 4.3 occurrences per post and infiltrating nearly 44% of all results. Twitter and Facebook trailed closely behind. Looking at this word cloud, it can be concluded that the majority of social media related to social media is directly related to using it as an advertising strategy. So how do people feel about this? Pretty good.

From my experiences of being indulged in social media marketing, all these feelings are pretty much inline. This next chart is pretty cool and shows where the content is coming from. Apparently, people tend to converse about Social Media through Twitter, so if you’ve got something interesting to interject, best get your @replies going.

Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy about an Austrian fashion journalist, opened to $14.2 million last Friday night. Then, the movie experienced a drastic decline in sales between Friday and Saturday, causing it to fall as much as $20 million short of some expectations for opening weekend.

Many experts speculated that negative word-of-mouth caused the sharp sales decline for Brüno, as social media sites like Twitter are enabling word-of-mouth to affect releases instantly. Time magazine said Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter, and that Friday is the new weekend when measuring box office success.

Brüno was a trending topic on Twitter throughout opening weekend. We decided to use Social Radar to analyze the sentiment of comments posted on Twitter throughout the last week.

Sentiment was overwhelmingly positive leading up to the opening, with more than 90% positive comments on July 6. But as the movie opening on July 10, the number of negative comments increased sharply, with almost 50% negative sentiment on opening weekend. Words like rotten, uncomfortable and gross appeared frequently throughout posts.

Twitter and other social media sites are empowering consumers to make more informed purchase decisions. With this new level of transparency and instant consumer reviews, product launches cannot hide behind marketing to tell the story.

As we discussed in our post about the angry United Airline customer who gained massive attention with his YouTube complaint, consumers are influencing each other directly more quickly and on a larger scale than ever before. How can companies maintain control of their brands in today’s transparent world?

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?

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?

One of the powers of emerging technologies is allowing companies to niche market like never before. Using Social Radar allows me to begin building a strategy around social media monitoring and, down the line, customer engagement. This is the first post in a series that will describe the significance of this tool in your usage of social media as a company.

Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring is becoming more and more popular and essential for companies. For better or for worse, your brand is not completely in your hands. Any person can talk about different aspects of your company in a variety of forms and make their opinion public for potentially millions of people to read using social networks and online tools. It is absolutely imperative that all companies begin to monitor their brand, products, and industry on the internet. Specifically, within the social media world. More people are participating more frequently in social networks every day. Perhaps they are a “fad,” but do you want to take that chance? With all of these online tools, it is becoming easier and easier for more people to become content creators online instead of just content consumers.

Using Social Radar allows you to monitor your company in as many or as few ways as you like. Monitoring is listening. How many times are we told that a good businessperson or a good salesperson is someone who has the ability to listen and deliver? Now you can listen to people talking in social media and utilize their feedback immediately. The information flows in real time, as if you can sit in a stadium full of people and hear only the conversations you want. Can you imagine receiving that kind of instant feedback? Now you can. With Social Radar, you can retrieve content instantly without having to scrape the entire internet or wait for aggregation. This allows for lightning fast and accurate analysis.

Social Radar allows you to build a query you can carry across multiple tools to track trends, key influencers, and even just the posts themselves. You can continue to build and refine your social media monitoring platform in one place using all the tools available from Social Radar. All content created in social media is time sensitive and is attached to specific dates, so you know when things are said, not just that they exist. This is key for information gathering and allows you to plan for the future.

So the questions are…

Are people talking about your company? Product? Industry?

Are you tuning into your customers and what they are saying?