Top brands on the net

BBC News: eBay is the top brand name on the net, according to calculations by net monitoring company Envisional. It scored the highest in terms of how positively it is perceived on the net, compared to McDonald's which had the most negative perception online.

Envisional says the top ten brands - selected from the FTSE-100 and lists of ‘Greatest Impact Brands’ compiled by brandchannel.com - are these:

1. Microsoft
2. Google
3. Yahoo!
4. Sony
5. HP
6. eBay
7. Apple
8. Disney
9. BBC
10. UPS

The ranking is calculated on Envisional's DEX metric which, the BBC report says, works like this:

The DEX metric is worked out based on the number of web pages, news sites and bulletin boards which feature each brand, as well as the prominence of the company name in each occurrence. The popularity of each company is then judged by combining "sentiment" measurements, which scores each brand name according to negative and positive references in the context in which the brand is discussed.

That sentiment measurement is used to work out eBay's position as the 'most positive' brand on the net and, in contrast, McDonald's as the 'most negative' brand.

Envisional's report makes interesting reading, especially in light of this comment by Ben Coppin, chief of Envisional, quoted in the BBC report:

The internet is fast approaching television in terms of influence on consumer behaviour and therefore big brands cannot afford to neglect the issue of how their brand is perceived on the web. For a brand holder, gaining any kind of useful information about a brand or company's standing on the internet - particularly in comparison with competitors - is tremendously difficult.

Download Envisional's PDF report from the Envisional blog. (The blog, incidentally, has no commenting, trackbacks nor RSS feed. A really one-way channel - a curious means of communication for a research company.)

Interesting additional comment from the BBC report:

[...] a lot more people are also becoming aware of brand names online in general and talk about them online, in blogs, for instance.

Market analysts Verdict recently found the internet was the fastest growing retail sector [in the UK] last year, attracting one in four shoppers.

For an entirely different view on brands, see Fast Talk: The Brand Called Me in Fast Company. No FTSE companies in these five examples. Highly-credible commentaries from the 'brand owners' themselves.

Smells like open source marketing to me.