.
This Week’s Issue:
The Sizzle: Facebook. The Fri-Up: Brand Olympics. The Sauce: Squirrel humiliation

Your weekly round-up of the hottest stories worldwide, served with a slice of topical social media analysis and a dollop of Friday fun

The Sizzle:

As we mentioned last week in the Friday#, we’ve teamed up with Mediacom Sport to create an Olympic Buzz Board. This displays real-time mentions of the Olympic sponsors, the total volume of mentions as well as the sentiment around the brands involved.

Each sponsor is represented by its own athlete-worm, with the adjacent number showing how many Olympic-related tweets have been posted about that brand over the last 28 days.

With Boris Johnson bellowing out of stations across London and the Olympic organisers brushing up on their flags of the world to avoid any more embarrasing mistakes, the start of the Olympics is now just hours away. This week we dedicate the Friday# to taking a look at the Sponsors’ standings as we head in to the first big weekend.

Fig 1. The Olympic brand buzz rankings

The leaderboard above shows the current standings as we head into the games (for the last 28 days to yesterday). McDonalds is firmly in the lead with Coca Cola, Adidas, Samsung and Cadburys making up the top five.

Samsung and Coca-Cola, have secured their places in the top five this week through their association the torch relay which reached its climax this week. Coca Cola’s particular focus has been music, mixing high profile artists with the up-and-coming, culminating in yesterday’s Olympic torch race finale show in Hyde Park yesterday, headlined by Dizzee Rascal. Samsung has been supporting the nation’s health with its hope relay, donating a pound for every mile walked, run or cycled, recorded by users on their mobile app, thus happily balancing out the burgers and chocolate and completing the top five on our board.

Another issue surrounding the games, highlighted here by our Cadbury’s worm, is how the games are actually allowed to be referred or referenced to and by whom. There has been much confusion surrounding the rights of people to mention or depict the games aside from the official sponsors.

Just this week Hamdy Shahein, a well-liked local newsagent in Stoke Newington, East London, whose shop happened to be on the Olympic torch route, was ordered by enforcement officers from Hackney Council to take down what they perceived to be non-regulation bunting and balloons to support the torch through his community. A bagel shop also got into trouble for hanging five bagels in its front window and nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow had problems when he took a picture of Tower Bridge for his website (The bridge bears the Olympic symbol for the duration of the games).

Here’s a quick look at how Nike got round branding regulationswith their Find Your Greatness campaign.


Gareth Ham: Head of Insight, Brandwatch, on Sky News

And in the news … the press pack are keeping a close eye on the response to such tight control. Sky News asked us to look at the social chat around the Olympic sponsors as part of their report which you can watch here.
#ILoveLondon – Get involved

You can be part of our buzz tracker too. By using the #ILoveLondon hashtag, you can secure your place on the buzz board as our Londoner worm vocalises your thoughts on the Olympic city.

Click here to go through to the Olympic buzzboard.
Olympic Sponsors Twitter Tracker

You can also keep an eye on our Twitter Tracker, also produced as part of our MediaCom SPORT partnership. Check out the latest commentary from MediaCom SPORT based on a combination of our data and analysis and MediaCom Sport’s insight and performance indicator. The tracker pulls in Twitter mentions of each sponsor, and awards a performance score based upon a dedicated formula (featuring sentiment, engagement and reach metrics), before ranking them in a league table.

Brandwatch has released its second annual Customer Services Index report. We looked at how brands and sectors measure up to each other in terms of customer service online and how the leading brands are doing it right.

The 2012 study, released this month, found that although brands have had a year to learn from the lessons offered by social media feedback, customer satisfaction levels still have not improved. Only three of the 40 brands analysed emerged with a score above zero – indicating that their customer service experience was successful overall. In fact, over half (52 per cent) of all customer service experiences were classified as negative. Only John Lewis (who came top), Waitrose and B&Q receive positive scores inthis year’s report which you can download for free here.

The findings of the study were also presented Our Social Times webinar on ‘How to use social media for customer service’. You can view the webinar here and click on ‘View the recording’

The Sauce

Something for the weekend:

Hope you enjoyed the Friday#, have a great weekend.

Read more: