I have a few thoughts on the Brand Bowl, a cooperative project between Mullen and Radian6 to measure the impact of Super Bowl ads through tweet volume.

Measuring social media is important, and it’s also difficult. Social medias bridge (or infringes upon, depending on your opinion) so many aspects of communication. Businesses already have established channels and metrics with which they account for these engagements through separate processes.  It’s only natural that, as companies begin to participate in social tactics, they look for specific and easily agreed upon metrics for success. One of these is the “brand mention”, which is what you call it when a user includes the name of a brand in his/her blog post, tweet or status update.  But I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the importance of the brand mention.

To start with, all mentions are not created equal. The phrases “this commercial really makes me hate brand X” and “that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen! I need some brand X” aren’t differentiated. And that’s just twitter-size bites. Then there’s the problem of public v. private sharing. There are very distinct personality differences between the people who Tweet and Digg and the people who might only share through email. You have to ask yourself if the audience you’re trying to engage with even wants to engage in public sharing, because catering to the audience that does can change the way your brand is perceived among the people that don’t. 

Any company wants to be top-of-mind, and even better to have one’s name on the lips of a target audience, and while mentions are often a symptom of success, I don’t believe that they are a stand-alone virtue. I have far more questions than answers on this so I’m going to leave the topic for now with what I do know: (1) We are still in the early days of two-way communication between brands and the recipients of marketing messages, and (2) I’m interested in far more than a Twitter search and a calculator to indicate positive communications.