Putting a Dollar Value on Buzz

Generating buzz—getting people talking about our products or even advertising on their own—is the goal of many ad campaigns today, even television commercials. (Case in point: the Super Bowl.) Online, buzz seems to be the Holy Grail: going viral, getting evangelists, having people talking/Tweeting/friending/following you. But assigning a value to that can be hard. We’re driven to assign an ROI to social media, but we’re having a hard enough time even monitoring success.

General Sentiment, a sentiment analysis company, has come to the rescue. Using media prices, they’re looking to answer the question “How much would it have cost to attract the same media exposure through traditional advertising?” And they’re putting a $ sign in front of it.

Starting with the Top-100 Global Brands from the 2009 Interbrand Report, General Sentiment looked at the buzz those companies were getting on news media, social media and Twitter (why they’re separated from social media, I don’t know, but it’s cool to look at their results on their own). They calculated how much these companies would have had to spend on traditional advertising to attract the same level of attention. General Sentiment published the top 20 in their Q4 Media Value Report

	Company	News Media	Social Media	Twitter	Total	Trend
1	Google	$244,593,000	$402,279,000	$22,756,000	$669,629,000	Down
2	Microsoft	$184,473,000	$452,006,000	$12,252,000	$648,732,000	Down
3	Sony	$80,574,000	$207,907,000	$5,825,000	$294,308,000	Down
4	Apple	$63,947,000	$223,657,000	$5,632,000	$293,237,000	Up
5	Yahoo	$50,324,000	$236,087,000	$5,354,000	$291,766,000	Down
6	Intel	$93,665,000	$189,880,000	$2,139,000	$285,685,000	Up
7	Ford	$145,369,000	$39,082,000	$1,453,000	$185,905,000	Up
8	IBM	$62,683,000	$85,957,000	$1,740,000	$150,381,000	Up
9	Citigroup	$105,614,000	$24,961,000	$749,000	$131,326,000	Up
10	HP	$46,249,000	$67,222,000	$2,423,000	$115,896,000	Up
11	eBay	$50,179,000	$56,889,000	$4,672,000	$115,740,000	Down
12	Oracle	$43,413,000	$70,838,000	$1,435,000	$115,686,000	Up
13	McDonalds	$80,579,000	$32,842,000	$1,840,000	$115,263,000	Down
14	Disney	$67,166,000	$35,811,000	$4,411,000	$107,390,000	Down
15	Nokia	$28,560,000	$71,843,000	$2,369,000	$102,772,000	Up
16	GE	$75,452,000	$24,536,000	$885,000	$100,864,000	Up
17	Dell	$34,491,000	$43,990,000	$1,553,000	$80,035,000	Down
18	American Express	$56,576,000	$19,803,000	$648,000	$77,028,000	Up
19	Cisco	$41,579,000	$25,273,000	$735,000	$67,588,000	Up
20	Blackberry	$22,706,000	$41,678,000	$2,038,000	$66,422,000	Up