• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, February 8, 2012

With marketers focusing more and more on the intersection between TV watching and social media activity, HootSuite conducted a comprehensive analysis of the social media efforts mounted by Super Bowl advertisers to see which did the best job (and which maybe not-so-good) when it came to engaging with fans before, during, and after the big game. HootSuite then ranked the players and produced a nifty word cloud, reproduced below, to show which brands came out on top.

HootSuite ranked Super Bowl advertisements by measuring their integration with social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube, among others, as well as the volume of traffic and the nature of sentiment expressed about their brands on these social media platforms. The analysis combined a number of different inputs, ranging from Twitter Trending data, hashtags and Twitter handles, to YouTube views and Facebook search results. Altogether HootSuite drew on data from a half-dozen different platforms and mapped it against Twitter trending data to arrive at a final score.

HootSuite chief marketing officer Ben Watson explained that the “heaviest weighting was given to scoring around the interactive engagement of the brand with fans on social media.  For example, Coke topped this out by having the bears watching the game with you on Facebook, having their URL load the Facebook experience, and by providing a series of entertaining gestures throughout the game for fans that were engaged.” He added that the Coca-Cola commercials “also directly supported ‘building the relationship’ with your new polar bear friends and having them join you, instead of just clicking on a URL to find out about a product.

The metrics allow for some flexibility in defining social media success. Thus the Chrysler ad featuring Clint Eastwood and H&M ad featuring David Beckham in his skivvies also scored relatively high in the HootSuite ranking because of the sheer amount of buzz generated on social media platforms, even though they didn’t actually have substantial social media assets prepared to catch and engage viewers online.

The rankings also took into account the quality of sentiment about a particular ad, according to Watson, who noted that while ads featuring animals might create a lot of buzz, “Having PETA speak out against your use of chimpanzees and greyhounds, for example, were not good indications of social insights that help brand stories.”

HootSuite also “used detractor scores for things like gaming social media for Likes, retweets, and so on,” including “bribing or begging for Likes, votes, or tweets.” The ranking system also penalized brands which took advantage of their popularity to SPAM social media users rather than actually following through with a real engagement strategy suitable to this interactive channel.