Tracking Starbucks in Social Media

This week I wanted to review some of the tracking tools available to gather data and monitor conversations about brands. I personally like to use Google Analytics on my blog, but this only analyzes website data, so I thought I would check out some tracking tools that work across social media platforms, like HowSociable and Addictomatic. These are both free applications that you can use online, and since they don’t require you to sign up, or download anything, they are easy (and quick) to use.

Side note: As a big Google fan I like to use Google Alerts, but since you can only receive data via email or RSS feed, it’s not really practical for this one-time-only type of search. It’s much more useful if you want to monitor information on an ongoing basis.

To test out how HowSociable and Addictomatic work, I thought I would take a look at conversations people are having about Starbucks, since it is such a huge global brand and one of the top-10 brands on Facebook, as I wrote about in this post.

So what are people actually saying about Starbucks? Here are ten relevant conversations I found on March 17, 2011 while searching Starbucks on HowSociable and Addictomatic. I will rate them according to how positive or negative I think they are, with positive = +1, neutral = 0 and negative = -1.

Facebook:
1.       Sabrina Hernandez: “The New Logo Sucks ! Change It Back!!!” Rating = -1
2.       Maggi Kovacs: “java chip choclate cream! <33333”  Rating = +1
3.       Isaac Corral: “Starbucks sucks!” 2 people like this. Rating = -1

Blogs:
4.       What’s So Special About Starbucks?: “I’m told that people either love Starbucks or hate it. I’m indifferent.” by Paul Simister. Rating = 0
5.      Starbucks: “Our weekend morning routine has to include trips to Starbucks.  We are just not the same otherwise.” by doublewd. Rating = +1
6.      Thursday = Working from Starbucks: “i love working from Starbucks, it is comfortable and i always feel inspired here.” by spearmint baby. Rating = +1

Twitter:
7.       MBDP_Tawsha: Drinking @Starbucks counts as wearing green, right? #StPatricksDay. 10+ recent retweets. Rating = 0
8.       starbucks: We are donating ¥100 million Yen ($1.2 million USD) to the @RedCross for relief efforts in Japan. #helpJapan http://sbux.co/fsjDQR. 400+ recent retweets. Rating = +1
9.       StefkaB: I'm not sure how I feel about this. Starbucks to buy Peet's? http://bit.ly/e35lXl. Rating = 0
10.   royswisdom: Starbucks, we are on every corner. #HonestAds. Rating = -1

Overall rating = +1

So in the end, Starbucks gets a positive rating, but I think these ratings just depend on which platform you use, and which posts you chose to analyze. However, as HowSociable pointed out, they are a highly "visible" company.

Right now a lot of people are negatively commenting (on Facebook) about the new logo Starbucks introduced but Starbucks also announced that they will be donating ¥100 million Yen ($1.2 million USD) to the Red Cross, so that is generating a lot of positive feedback (on Twitter). Overall, I think that people feel strongly about Starbucks, one way or another, and calculating the sentiment of asll these comments they almost cancel each other out. However, if Starbuck’s wanted to find out what people think about their company, they could definitely find out that a lot of people are talking about their logo, and more recently, their donation to the Red Cross. So for Starbucks, I think it would be more useful to rate the sentiment on a certain topic (eg. new logo) instead of across the whole brand.

So have you had any success with tracking tools? Which ones do you think are the best? 

This is what I’ve learned about HowSociable and Addictomatic:

  About HowSociable:

• Enables access to data from 32 different social media sites, all visible on one page.
• Each brand receives an overall score in each category and an overall “visibility score”. A good way to compare across brands.
• Note: Ratings compared to one (unnamed) globally recognized traditional brand, which received a score of 1,000, and put on a sliding scale.
• Starbucks’ overall visibility score is 3,473 (vs. Coca-Cola = 3,522)
• To find actual comments/blogs/tweets etc., you need to leave the page, which can be time consuming, if you are comparing sites.

 About Addictomatic: 

• Only enables access to data from 25 different social media sites, but you can create a custom page, and add, delete and move around the feeds you are interested in and then bookmark it. This is a great feature.
• You can also view a preview of the comments/blogs/tweets etc., and while you hold your mouse over the subject it gives you a preview of where your search term was mentioned. No need to leave the page to compare sites.
• Of the 25 different sites, I couldn’t find Facebook, which is weird. This is why I also used HowSociable in this experiment.