MUMBAI: Events like the ongoing Cricket World Cup 2015 are becoming opportunities for brands to leverage the euphoria generated by cricket crazy fans.  A lot of these brands have launched innovative campaigns on social media channels, by spending oodles of money and engaging social users especially the millennials. 

Digital analytics company TO THE NEW Digital has come up with an innovative framework that helps brand measure their “Social Impact Index” to gauge the effectiveness of their digital media campaigns. The report also mentions the social media strategies they can use to reinvent and recalibrate their campaigns to ensure a visceral brand connect with their target groups.

The Social Impact Index of Brands has been calculated by plotting a bubble chart of social media mentions and social sentiment score of various campaigns run by 14 brands* across four categories namely FMCG, Consumer Electronics, Auto and Sports. It has considered only B2C brands in its sample study to facilitate a like to like comparison. (*If a brand is running more than one campaign then the consolidated numbers of those campaigns have been considered for the analysis.)

For example, if Pepsico has a total of 33,024 social media mentions and **Net Sentiment of 18 per cent, then the Social Sentiment Score is 59,44,32. 

**Net Sentiment = Positive Segment – Negative Segment

-Some of the insights from the framework are as follows:

Nike is a “Social Star” as it enjoys a huge number of social media mentions as well as a high net sentiment in those mentions. It recommends that Nike has everything going in the right direction for its campaign but it can work on further optimising its ROI from social media spends to maintain its status quo of a “Social Star.” 

It further says that Star Sports and Pepsico are “Social Question Marks” as they have done fairly well on the social mentions front but their net sentiment is low. The recommendation for these two brands in this category is that they have done well but can invest in online reputation management exercise to converge from Social Question Marks to Social Stars. 

A large number of brands like Cadbury, Castrol, Hyundai, Sony, Intel and MRF have been categorized as “Social Laggards” category as they enjoy a high net sentiment. It is recommended that these brands have done well but can invest in online reputation management exercise too, so that they converge from Social Laggards to Social Stars.

Meanwhile a few players like LG, Reebok, Nestle and Dominoz have fizzled out in their social media campaigns and have been put into the category of “Social Duds” as they have low number of social media mentions as well as a low net sentiment.

TO THE NEW CEO Deepak Mittal stated that brands in this category need to invest heavily in improving their outreach in the form of mentions by investing in paid campaigns and also engage in online reputation management exercise to improve their net sentiment. “They can also think about evaluating their campaign further and move to a new positioning for their brand on social media front,” he added.

Category Scorecard

Evaluation Framework- The Social Impact Index of all the 14 brands were plotted on a X-Y axis Bubble Chart. The average of Social Media Mentions of all the 14 brands has been used as a demarcation for High-Low social media mention score. Similarly the average of Social Media Sentiment of all the 14 brands has been used as a demarcation for High-Low social media sentiment score. Therefore a bubble chart is divided into four quadrants to evaluate the success of the campaigns run by these brands.