Top 10 valued brands by social media presence
Millward Brown today released a new report ranking the world’s most valued brands. While the research agency mentions the importance of social media in future valuations (it’ll be big, they say), it bases its methodology on more traditional metrics. We thought it might be interesting to do a kind of mashup of the results, taking a look at how their top ten ranked if you added a measure of their social media presence.
Here’s what we came up with:
The numbers deviate slightly, with Google slipping from tops on the MB ranking to No. 2 in our tally. Everyday popular brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, meanwhile, placed in the top 3 in our ranking, a sign they are doing a better job to build loyalty via social media than the major internet and technology companies. To be honest, we were expecting better from IBM, the vaunted technology leader that usually cracks the top 5 brand value league tables. It comes in at number 7 on our tally.
The low numbers from Marlboro were to be expected. Some of their biggest customers (teens and young adults) hang out on social networks where any centralized presence or advertising would probably push the buttons of your local congressman. China Mobile numbers were in line with what we expected at the bottom of our list. In fairness, China Mobile has a bigger following on Chinese social media networks like Xiaonei.
Here’s a look at our chart methodology:
- the “SM Overall” category consists of Twitter followers + Facebook Likes + Youtube subscribers.
- “Centralized SM” we define as whether the company itself was taking an active role in maintaining and marketing its various SM channels. From this list, just Big Tobacco, hamstrung by marketing bans, and Apple, whose marketing team ritually ignores social media, do not have what we’d consider a “centralized social media strategy.” For them, the numbers reflect what avid fans have created and signed up to in their place.
- “Value in Millions” is Millward Brown’s metric.


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Top 10 valued brands by social media presence – Millward Brown today released a new report ranking the world’s most… http://ow.ly/17ddRH
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Social media spend at the world’s 10 Most Valuable Brands: http://mnstr.me/9kifwi #smchat #marketing
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Top 10 valued brands by social media presence http://bit.ly/bH16uS
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“Social Media Influence: Social Media News ‘ Intellegence » Top 10 …” http://bit.ly/b4pYOZ
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Coca-Cola,most valued brand even by social media; http://bit.ly/c2Q1eN
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[...] not? We’ve done it too to give a reasonable measure of a brand’s popularity, contrasting it against Millward [...]
[...] and Coca-Cola, too. Besides that, the rankings didn’t change too drastically from last year, except Vodafone dropped from the top-ten to number 12 and AT&T took its place. Ad Age notes [...]
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