Christian Blanchas relied on the latest Attention Rate Barometer to analyse banks’ communication strategies and their impacts on internet users. He came to the conclusion that in spite of its effort at communicating, the banking sector is no longer able to catch French people’s attention – a situation that typically calls for crisis communication solutions. What is the best advice for a bank faced with customers that won’t listen anymore? Keep quiet? How about following the example set by Toyota?

CB News 15/02/2010 – Christian Blachas

The team @ TrendyBuzz is happy to announce its new feature, updated in real time: TrendyBuzz mapping!

Amongst the WebTrackers that collect online messages regarding your brands, competitors or your strategic environment, you can now visualize, in real time, the interactions among the 100 most dynamic, influential or powerful sources (news sites, blogs, forums or social networks). The objective is to:

- Have an immediate overview of the websites that should be taken into account for your eReputation management strategy.
- Apprehend how information navigates amongst journalists, bloggers and consumers, so as to understand their respective level of influence.
- Draw a list of the sources that enjoy the highest level of interaction with opinion leaders (number of backlinks & outlinks).
- Unveil the main primary and secondary universes for the brand.
- Grasp how your competitors’ communication strategies evolve through time.
…

Should you have any additional question, or simply fancy trying TrendyBuzz mapping, feel free to get in touch with us.

Most noticeable points regarding the classification of the 50 brands that generated the most attention on the French web in December 2009:

The two leaders, Twitter and Google, are still very much ahead of their challengers. Google’s launch of the Nexus One is very likely to increase their online attention, as the product is already showing up as a tag related to the brand. Google has embarked upon the business of creating attention around its products: Chrome (enjoying a 4×3 poster campaign in Paris, a real paradigm shift!), Nexus One (already) and Wave. Twitter’s attention results from its being compared with other networks – its main corresponding tags being Facebook, Google and Youtube!

The three challengers reveal a stagnating Microsoft (Windows 7? Old news already?) and a decreasing Apple. A major announcement is expected from Apple late January (the famous tablet?), the Attention Rate Barometer will unveil the buzz preceding Apple’s revolutions. To be continued…

A few other points:

. Yahoo and Ebay are coming back thanks to the communities. Two explanations: Xmas and the “second hand” effect for Ebay.

. HTC is already benefiting from producing Google’s Nexus One.

. Not only is TF1 the French leading brand (thanks to football games and the Miss France beauty pageant) but it is the main contributor to its competitors’ attention rate (main tag for France2 and M6!).

. RTL is truly benefiting from Johnny Halliday’s troubles…

. Renault’s attention rate is decreasing but it remains a leading brand on the French web. The brand’s conviction following an employee’s suicide greatly impacted upon its online attention, though.

. No such trouble for Orange …, the brand was not bothered by France Telecom’s poorly reputation. The phone business is pushed forward by the arrival of Free as a fourth mobile phone contractor.

. Still no names from the luxury or retail industry, although Ikea (55^th) and Channel (61^st) are coming closer.

TrendyBuzz also recommends Alexis Mons’s more detailed analysis.

“WASALive V3 is a real « buzz engine » that shows keywords’ diffusion on various media, timeline of the messages or their TrendyRank [level of influence] …”

Jérôme Bouteiller – Neteco (14th december 2009)

>> Live international buzz

A tag cloud, on the home page, shows the most common themes broached by worldwide web users, so you know what the hot topics are, for each language. Messages are scanned in French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian and Arabic.

>> Automatic interpretation indicators

3 graphs are automatically generated to complete the search results:

. Messages sorted by media types:
Where is a specific topic being discussed? News sites? Blogs? Social web?

. Timeline of messages:
How is the topic evolving? Is the buzz increasing, decreasing or stagnating?

. Messages sorted by level of influence:
Is the topic being discussed by influencers or by the long tail?

>> Top10 of most viral videos

On the home page, get a glimpse of the most embedded videos online. And on the dedicated page, get the Top10, completed with the latest posts or articles where the videos have been published. You can switch from one language to the other.

The third opus of the barometre brings along a clear acceleration. While it remained fairly stable over September and October, the attention rate volume suddenly increased by 23 % in November, a media equivalence of 220,000 new messages (understand a message as a substantial article published on the front page of a wel-known daily newspaper). And the research corpus cannot account for this increase. Although Trendybuzz constantly expands this corpus, so as to scan as many relevant sources as possible, November was in no way exceptional.

Although the attention rate volume has clearly increased, major trends remain:

• Google and Twitter are still ahead, the latter first in line in November thanks to its new feature: the lists

• Apple and Facebook are following, and have left Microsoft hovering behind while they enjoy an average monthly increase of 16 %

• the yet unchallenged top5 is followed by another fairly constant top5, including TF1, Renault, La Poste, Youtube and Sony

• SFR follows and still stands as an exception: the only French brand whose audience mainly comes from online communities and social web

• as a whole, the top25 is getting fairly constant and robust

• it still does not include any name from the retail or luxury industries. Chanel ranks 72^nd, McDonalds 87^th and Carrefour 99^th.