The Vitrue Social Media Index (SMI) was designed to help marketers benchmark their standings and provides  the industry a gauge to help define who is effectively utilizing social media practices.  In January of this year, Vitrue announced the first ever top social brands of 2008 which complied the top 100 brands overall.  The Vitrue SMI is the first tool to measure word of mouth and provides a simple and comprehensive snapshot of what people are talking about on the social web.

Today we are excited to apply this approach to focus on the automotive vertical.  The Vitrue 20 Top Social Auto Brands represents companies who are establishing their social presence and doing so successfully. With the NY International Auto Show in full swing, we wanted to share findings.

Press Release:

Ford, Lincoln Top First-Ever Automotive Social Media Rankings, Top-20 List Reveals Success in Influential Social Media World

Additional commentary from Reggie Bradford, CEO of Vitrue:

Methodology

The Vitrue 20 Top Social Auto Brands is the result of Vitrue’s daily analysis of sample set of automotive brands.

Each day, Vitrue analyzes the online conversations on a variety of social networking, blogging, microblogging, photo and video sharing sites.

The Vitrue SMI calculates scores about the brand’s social conversations. We apply a series of algorithms to reflect the frequency of usage, the size of the social media environment, and the magnitude of the conversation. The result is a single numeric score for each brand: the Vitrue Social Media Index (SMI).

The Vitrue SMI is a unit-less number and that can be compared with other Vitrue SMI scores to provide a simple, relative measure of conversations on the web.

The two most common uses are:

1. Tracking movement of a single brand over time
2. Comparing a brand with its competitors, either at an individual point in time or over a period of weeks or months

The changing world of online conversations results in significant movements up and down for brands. The Vitrue 20 Top Social Auto Brands was determined by averaging the SMI scores for each brand across each day from January 1, 2009 to March 31, 2009. The result is a ranked list of the brands which are most talked about on the social web.

Because people often do not use a product’s full name in online conversations, we adapt our results to reflect common language usage. This dynamic process continues to evolve along with brands and language itself, with the goal of having the Vitrue SMI reflect the way people actually speak and type about brands.

Vitrue’s SMI reflects a combination of patent-pending technology, proprietary methodologies, and continuous refinement based on daily feedback and calibration. It provides the marketer with the industry’s simplest, most direct snapshot of conversations on the social web.

We welcome your input.
We continue to evolve and refine the SMI to capture and measure social conversations on the web. We’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and join the conversation.

This entry was posted by Gretchen Miller on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 9:34 am and is filed under Industry News, Vitrue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.