Social Brands 100 launches today

The Social Brands 100 set out to rank brands based on their ability to engage with connected communities. Dell came out on top of a list that includes brands from 20 different sectors, including retail, FMCG and entertainment.

Social Brands 100 Top 5:
1. Dell
2. Nike Plus
3. Starbucks
4. giffgaff
5. BestBuy UK

Headstream, the social specialists, conducted the research over 3 months from November 2010 when nominations were crowd sourced on Twitter.

Researchers quantitatively evaluated about 30 000 tweets, posts, comments and likes. An independent panel of experts scored each brand and social media monitoring partner Brandwatch provided social media data analytics.

"We wanted to find out what really makes a brand social," said Kirsty Weston, head of Social Communications at Headstream. 'The bad news for some is that we didn't find a simple answer to this question because these brands engage in a diverse range of ways appropriate to their communities. The best examples, however, do stand out for commercial gains they've made from good use of social. It'll be interesting to see where social brands sit in relation to geo-location outposts in a year's time, as they start integrating the virtual and the real."

Download the full Social Brands 100 Report. Follow @socialbrands100 and #sb100 to join the conversation. The Social Brands 100 will be launched at an event in London today. Images will be available in almost real time at http://bit.ly/sb100pics between 9-11am.