And the Buzziest Billion-Dollar Brand of the Week Is...
Dumenco's Trendrr Chart: A Week of Tiger Woods
| "Tiger Woods" (Tweets Per Day vs. Google News Results vs. Google Blog Results) |
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| Key: "tiger woods" (source: Matching Twitter Posts per Day) "tiger woods" (source: News Stories from Google) "tiger woods" (source: Number of Blog Posts from Google) |
The buzziest billion-dollar brand of the week is also the most-embattled brand of the week. You saw this coming: It's Tiger Woods.
Usually the Trendrr Chart of the Week focuses on one metric, but this week we're offering a three-course buzz buffet. A few notes and observations:
AP
Tiger Woods - On Friday of last week, in the aftermath of his car accident, Tiger Woods was name-checked in 56,868 tweets. This week, thanks to the slowly unfolding post-accident scandal having to do with the state of his, um, married life, he came pretty close to matching that peak with 52,093 tweets yesterday.
- As of yesterday, Google News was indexing more than 46,000 active news stories (considered active if it's been 30 days or less since their publication date) about Tiger Woods. Of course, he's pretty much always a constant in Google News thanks to his years of omnipresence in the sports pages, but his recent surge in, uh, newsworthiness due to his reported sexual prowess seems to be trumping anything he's ever done with his athletic skills.
- The stats that Google Blog Search is reporting on "Tiger Woods" as a blog meme are pretty amazing: As of yesterday, Google was indexing 14,560,543 blog posts around the world that name-check him. Of course, that number is cumulative -- it includes years and years of sporty blogging about his exploits as a global athletic superstar (so just one sports blog might have hundreds or even thousands of individual blog posts mentioning him). But still, the recent jump is rather astonishing.
- The smartest thing I've read about the rise and fall of Brand Tiger? Charles P. Pierce's "Is This the End of Tiger Woods?," posted yesterday on Esquire's blog. A brief excerpt: "Back in 1997, one of the worst-kept secrets on the PGA Tour was that Tiger was something of a hound. Everybody knew. Everybody had a story. Occasionally somebody saw it, but nobody wanted to talk about it, except in bar-room whispers late at night. Tiger's People at the International Management Group visibly got the vapors if you even implied anything about it. However, from that moment on, the marketing cocoon around him became almost impenetrable. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers. The perfect marriage with the perfect kids slipped so easily into the narrative it seemed he'd been born married." The whole thing is definitely worth reading.
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Dumenco's Trendrr Chart of the Week is produced in collaboration with Wiredset, the New York digital agency behind Trendrr, a social- and digital-media tracking service. More background here. A basic Trendrr account is free; Trendrr Pro, which offers more robust tracking and reporting tools, comes in various paid flavors (get the details here).
Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.