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.

Restaurant brands made up 7% of top social brands on Vitrue 100 (overall top social brands of 2008).  We have seen great adoption and feel this category is a perfect fit for social media marketing so we wanted to dig down and look more closely at vertical.

Today we are excited to apply this approach to focus on the restaurant vertical.  As covered in Nation’s Restaurant News, The Vitrue 25 Top Social Restaurant Brands represents companies who are establishing their social presence and doing so successfully.

Methodology
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 was designed to be a simple and directional tool for marketers to help make sense of the overwhelming amount of data

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. To establish most social restaurant brands – we looked at average SMI scores for over 160 brands from QSR and Fast Casual segments over 30 day period (5/1/09 to 6/1/09). We used our beta version of the SMI which has been ranking brands since last the fall of 2008 and widely covered in the press, for more coverage please visit http://vitrue.com/press-room.

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. With all terms we took into account how to best vet them for accurate representation.

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.

Moving Forward
Just this month we announced an updated version of the Vitrue SMI moving it out of beta to Version 1.0.  As the social media landscape continues to evolve, so must the Vitrue SMI. To keep up with the evolution, we have re-calibrated the algorithm to reflect site growth, decline and popularity from the major social networks.

To a large degree Vitrue SMI scores have gone up since May and with the new SMI they have show a dramatic improvement which will be reflected in future studies.  We encourage all marketers to visit the Vitrue SMI and query their terms – great to see how you stack up and composition of scores.  We have also included sharing functionality where reports can be directly published to Twitter and Facebook.

With the new version of SMI now launched, we will report back on the same vertical with July data averages in early August.  Be sure to follow us on twitter.com/vitrue or fan us on facebook.com/vitrue or subscribe to our RSS feed to updated report in August.

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 Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under 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.