Sponsorship Buzz Tracking Tools Show Who’s Leading Race In “Mention Marathon”

Social media monitoring company Brandwatch and MediaCom Sport, the sports marketing division of MediaCom Worldwide have developed a data visualisation tool and Twitter tracker which will track the online impact of Olympics sponsorship campaigns.

The Buzz Board [http://labs.brandwatch.com/mediacom/buzzboard/] – a data visualisation displaying real-time mentions of Olympic sponsors including Panasonic, BA, Samsung, BP, McDonald’s, Coca Cola and Visa – shows 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.

An Olympic Sponsors Twitter Tracker [http://www.mediacom.com] is also being launched, combining the social media monitoring and analysis capabilities of Brandwatch with MediaCom Sport’s insight and performance indicator. This tool 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. 

The upcoming games is set to be one of the most popular social media events in sporting history, with Twitter playing a prominent role as host of the online buzz surrounding the various competitions. London expects to break social media sports consumption records, and race ahead of previous Twitter activity benchmarks around sporting events.   

Giles Palmer, CEO of Brandwatch, said: “Over the past four years these brands have shelled out serious money to sponsor the games, and they’ll be after huge returns as a result. Tapping into the rise in social media sports consumption, this tool is a real ‘games-changer’: giving brands minute-by-minute feedback on their Twitter performance, something they’ve never had before.”

“We launched a similar data visualisation for Super Bowl 2012, and what we found there was that brands need to act extremely quickly on online feedback. They need to figure out what’s worked well, and what hasn’t. It’s not enough just gathering loads of data and sitting on it. Brands need to be reacting and adjusting their communications in real-time. ”

Marcus John, Global Head of MediaCom Sport said: “We believe that sports sponsorship can be a powerful and sophisticated communications channel for today’s brands, offering them the chance to engage and invigorate target stakeholders as never before. To prove success however, brands must first exploit these channels to add value to the fan experience and then ensure that they understand the success of their campaigns and use any learning to form better strategies to connect with consumers.”