• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, February 11, 2011

Super Bowl advertising is the gift that keeps on giving to online news. Polls and debates over the spots lingered for days. Groupon gave us a special bonus this year with its staggering misfire of send-ups of charity ads. Now it is time for the after-after party, reflections on the deeper effects of that advertising film festival.

Now we get the social media response as measured by analytics firm, Alterian. According to its Social Sentiment Engagement Index (SSEI), Volkswagen and Pepsi were the clearest beneficiaries from their Super bowl spots in terms of positive social buzz.  Alterian says that its SSEI combines the social reach of mentions of a brand with the general sentiment associated with the posts. Alterian scans blogs, social networks and the other usual suspects for gauging user attitudes via social media. It then weighs the number of mentions against the influence of the participants. A baseline of 0 is the average brand score. But Volkswagen and its kid Darth ad achieved an index of 451 and Pepsi and its Max series got 421. Both brands were far ahead of the third-ranked Doritos (294) and its dog charging the sliding door and Mars for its Richard Lewis/Roseanne Barr spot. The Chrysler "Imported from Detroit" ad that stood out for me rounded out the top 5.

Not surprisingly, Groupon (-123) was the big loser in the buzzosphere this week. But curiously Coca-Cola (-3) lost some ground and Motorola's anti-Apple promo for its upcoming Xoom tablet (-22) may have backfired. As anyone who writes about tech online could well tell them, criticizing Apple is flame bait of the most predictable sort. But when an ad even takes aim at Apple customers by depicting anyone with white earbuds as automatons, well that is just asking for it.

In an interesting attempt to calculate social media ROI for these ads, Alterian also came up with a Cost per Social Impression index that combines reach and popularity and then estimates the cost of engaging each person via social media based on the official $3 million per 30-second rate. In that configuration CarMax spent $3.10 for each positive impression and BMW Mini spent $2.37, far more than anyone else.