Vitrue, a social media marketing company has announced a ”Top Social Brands of 2008′ list. The company developed a methodology that tracked conversations on a variety of social networking, blogging, microblogging, photo and video sharing sites and developed an algorithm to determine the most popular brands mentioned in these social media sites. This list focuses on businesses only - Obama, Palin, Spears and other ‘personal brands’ did not make the list.
The list is an interesting scan with few surprises which, by-and-large reflects the most well know brands. The one glaring omission is ‘Google’ not appearing in the top 100. It’s hard to imagine that ‘Sears’ registers higher in the zeitgeist of web-users than Google. Perhaps they chose to exclude verbs from their list as well. Here are the top 10:
1. IPhone
2. CNN
3. Apple
4. Disney
5. Xbox
6. Starbucks
7. iPod
8. MTV
9. Sony
10. Dell
