U.S. athletes met with great success at the Olympics, as did theseven global sponsors that CI tracked. Our final social media Olympic analysis focuses on the overall brand lift and % change of Olympic conversation around selected sponsors over two two-week time periods: pre-Olympic (7/22 – 8/7) and Olympic (8/8 - 8/24).

Visa’s Olympic-focused online activity yielded the highest lift with a 211% increase during the Olympics. McDonald’s followed with a 144% increase.

CI also measured overall brand lift by tracking mentions of each sponsor apart from Olympic-focused conversations. Using this metric, Beijing-based Lenovo Ltd. came out on top. Although the company only showed a 68% increase in the above Olympic activity calculation, general conversation around Lenovo increased 37% from the pre-Olympic to Olympic time periods.

Sentiment was also highly positive for Lenovo for both time periods, increasing slightly during the Olympics.

CI collected and analyzed this data set for all of the seven selected sponsors; feel free to contact us to get the full report.

Tags: Advertising/Marketing // Add Comment »

Looking for tips on how to make Twitter work for your business? Here’s a quick fifty ideas from Chris Brogan’s blog. The tips are broken down into categories such as: first steps, what to tweet, and the Twitter-positive arguments to the most common Twitter cons you’ll come across. The post is a great primer for someone who’s itching to join the conversation and is looking for what to do to get started.   Now go get twittering….
More from Chris Brogan

Tags: Social Media Best Practice // Add Comment »

The 2008 Olympics have already been marked by both shattered records and controversy, making it the perfect event to cover in Social Media. CI tracked eight selected Beijing Olympic sponsors— Visa, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Lenovo, UPS, General Electric, Kodak and Panasonic— over a selected time period of 8/2 to 8/13. We compared each sponsor’s Olympic-focused conversation from the six days prior to the Olympics (8/2 to 8/7) to the first six days of the Olympics (8/8 to 8/13).

Three sponsors in particular stand out as having achieved a significant Social Media lift: Coke, McDonald’s and Visa. Coke, when referenced near the Olympics, experienced a 17% lift from the first time period to the second. A great deal of conversation surrounded their Bluetooth campaign, which is the first instance of Bluetooth marketing in Olympic history.

Activity around McDonald’s and the Olympics increased 51%. People posted most often about their TV commercials and their large, temporary store on the Olympic Green.

Visa’s Olympic-focused activity increased by an outstanding 141%, showing the huge success of their campaign. Their role as the sole payment method of the Olympics, as well as their mid-Olympics release of the special-edition Michael Phelps commercial contributed to this drastic increase in Visa’s buzz.

Tonality was overall positive for all selected sponsors, although UPS/Olympic conversation accumulated a bit more negative sentiment when pro-Tibet protestors stormed a French UPS store on 8/6.

Although negative sentiment for the sponsors continues around human rights issues, the majority of these posts do not single out specific sponsors. Individually, these eight sponsors have been generally well-received by the overall public, and many have shown an increase in Social Media activity as the Olympics continue.

CI will continue to track the Olympics through the completion of the games and follow up with our new findings.

– Jackie Wood

Tags: Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture, Social Media Insights, Social Media Monitoring // 1 Comment »

Collective Intellect’s President Tim Lefkowicz kicked off the start of the 2008 Summer Olympics by appearing on the Fox Business Network (FBN) Money for Breakfast Show anchored by Alexis Glick which follows pre-market business headlines. FBN sought Collective Intellect’s opinion on the results of the pre-Olympic Sentiment around the major brands that are advertising at the Olympics, and we are expecting to return later in August with more interesting insights.

Referring to CI’s latest report, Glick, asked about how the traditional Big 3 of VISA , Coca-Cola and McDonald’s were doing heading into the Beijing games. Joining Lefkowicz and Glick was Mark Sunshine from First Capital to discuss these three big sponsors from the financial market perspective. Sentiment calculations list positive sentiment for VISA, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds. The other brands mentioned as part of this pool are GE, Kodak and Panasonic.

Lefkowicz predicted that “VISA was the Brand to beat running up to the opening ceremonies” based upon CI’s reporting.

A few highlights from the conversation are summarized below:

Visa had a positive sentiment of 67%, the largest share out of the Big 3, which can be contributed to VISAs campaign with the “Come Together” Olympics narrated by Morgan Freeman as well as another AD which features US Olympic team swimmer and gold medal contender Michael Phelps.

McDonald’s themes are much focused media campaigns on Olympic China advertising like “I love it when China wins.” Mr. Sunshine mentioned that McDonalds is actually down playing their Olympic involvement in the U.K. to avoid possible boycotts over alleged human rights violations by China.

Coca-Cola’s “Bird’s Nest” campaign does well with their theme of cooperation, and their embracement of social media and the younger demographics. Coca-Cola is a mainstay of the Olympics.

For the complete version of FBN’s “Gold Medal Marketing Show”, watch the following clip: http://snurl.com/3cw7y

Tags: Blog Analysis, Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture, Social Media Monitoring // Add Comment »

As the 2008 Summer Olympics approaches, Collective Intellect slices down the analysis to the even more granular level of Brands and their Olympic-specific marketing composition. By doing this and sampling the two weeks directly prior to the start of the Olympics (7/25 to 8/7/2008).

Our results:

The traditional Big 3 of Visa, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s still lead heading into the Beijing games. And to their credit, they seem to be taking advantage of their lead. Sentiment calculations list positive sentiment as 67%, 51% and 48% for Visa, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s respectively.

UPS, Panasonic, Lenovo, and Kodak make up less than 10% combined.

And given the controversy surrounding the Olympics this year we also wanted to drill a bit deeper into any of the themes associated with negative posts. As it turns out these mostly were associated with censorship and politics with pollution also being a major concern.

Our results:

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

The 2008 Olympics in China are already generating a great deal of buzz in the Social Media world, particularly around certain Olympic Sponsors. Collective Intellect is actively tracking the buzz around Visa, McDonald’s, UPS, General Electric, Coca-Cola, Panasonic and Kodak. By comparing all sponsors and evaluating each sponsors lift through increase in online conversation, CI will be able to measure the success of each Olympic campaign and ultimately the value of Olympic spending.

Activity and sentiment analysis will play a large roll in online Olympic tracking. For example, although Visa currently has the largest share-of-voice at 42% (see chart below) of the seven selected sponsors, they also have the largest amount of negative sentiment. As the Olympics approach and we continue to dig deeper, it will be interesting to see if this trend changes over time and if negative themes emerge in the Visa Olympic sponsorship conversations that occur.

Throughout the Olympic Games, CI will continue to track and analyze data trends for these major sponsors and release findings along the way. Stay tuned; the Olympics kick-off Friday.

Tags: Uncategorized // 3 Comments »