• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 1, 2013

Once again football time comes to America. Never mind getting together with friends and family to enjoy the game -- marketers just want to think about data. The great American pastime has turned into a race to discover what brands influence consumers most, and how much money they will scrape from their pockets.

Max Kalehoff, VP of product marketing at Syncapse, believes that finding the value of a brand demonstrates to search marketing both existing and emerging interest and intent -- core intelligence for forecasting demand to optimize campaigns. He said many search marketers also run social ads, especially in Facebook.

"Early buzz can predict some of the likely searches to happen with Facebook Graph Search," Kalehoff said. "There is not much marketers can do in the short term to act on Facebook Graph Search behaviors, but now is a critical time to start observing how big marketing events and early buzz prompt Facebook search-related behaviors. Inevitably, there will be tools and clearer tactics developed to specifically capitalize. But now is the time to start observing closely under this lens. "

Syncapse, a social media enterprise marketing company, released analysis Friday looking at the most social Facebook brand pages leading into the Super Bowl, and then on Monday plans to issue analysis of the satiability of the social buzz following the game.

Volkswagen with a core of 90 took the No. 1 spot, followed by The Walking Dead with 88; Audi, 88; Mercedes-Benz, 88; and Coca-Cola, 83. Eight of the top ten current SynQ scores come from brands that have released commercial previews or teasers ahead of the Super Bowl. Of the remaining 26 brands, 13 have released commercial previews or teasers.

The top five-gaining brand pages between Jan. 21 and 27, 2013 were led by Bud Black Crown, which rose 35 points compared with the 14 days prior. Cars.com was up 34 points, followed by GoDaddy lagging at 15 points; Pizza Hut, up 14 points; and Lincoln Motor Company, up 11 points.

Of the brands with the most SynQ score improvement since Jan. 21, seven of the top ten released commercial previews or teasers. Two of the three that did not managed to generate recent news of their own. SodaStream stirred up buzz when CBS rejected their ad on the basis that it overly bashed Pepsi and Coca-Cola, two other Super Bowl sponsors; and Pizza Hut announced the winners of a contest with a prize to be featured in their commercial on Jan. 25.

Facebook brand page scores are based on Syncapse's SynQ rating, a social brand health index that combines page performance metrics like fan count, Fan growth and engagement compared with the previous fourteen days. The closer a brand scores to 100, the stronger its social momentum. This analysis also included YouTube commercial previews.

Play ball! Oh, sorry -- that's baseball.