Rebecca Bley, Research Analyst, Nielsen Company
“Life moves pretty fast,” Ferris Bueller warned us. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Director John Hughes managed to capture slices of that fast-moving life on film, offering iconic, relatable characters like Ferris and the Breakfast Club kids to an entire generation. When he died suddenly on August 6, the Internet mourned the loss of a great voice in Hollywood. On the day after his death, Hughes was the most-discussed person on the Internet, according …

Interview by Sue MacDonald, Research Manager, Online Division
In a difficult economy of rising unemployment, struggling newspapers and advertising agency cutbacks, Alexa Robinson graduated this year from the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill with a degree in… journalism and advertising. But she wound up finding a position that carried an entirely new job title — one that didn’t even exist when she started at UNC — “Twintern.”
As Pizza Hut’s first-ever Twitter intern (Twitter + intern, hence, “Twintern”), the 22-year-old Greensboro NC native has been on the job in Dallas since late …

By Scott Hamm
If you have not heard of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) by now, chances are you will be hearing about it in the near future. After breaking into the mainstream with The Ultimate Fighter reality series in 2005, an analysis of online buzz shows that the UFC continues to make great strides in popularity.
Backed by cable television programming and monthly pay-per-view events, the UFC has steadily gained online buzz during the past 18 months. Since 2008, UFC buzz has trended upward and peaked with the UFC 94 event …

A recent video made by two rogue and rude Domino’s employees left a bad taste in the mouth of customers who watched it. But, thanks to some social media tipsters, Domino’s was able to issue their own YouTube response quickly as a remedy to the potentially brand damaging viral video. The buzz online about the brand spiked during the crisis.

Patrick Doyle, President, Domino’s U.S.A., thanked the online community for the tip in his video and the brand also created a twitter account @dpzinfo to communicate.

According to Nielsen Online’s BuzzMetrics Service, Brad Pitt and Kate Winslet have garnered the most buzz so far compared with other nominees in the Best Actor and Best Actress categories with 47% and 46% of buzz volume, respectively.  Brad Pitt has more than double the amount of pre-show buzz compared with Mickey Rourke (22%), who follows Pitt in the buzz ranking, and nearly triples buzz volume compared to Sean Penn (17%).  Pre-show buzz seems to be a tighter race among the Best Actress nominees as Angelina Jolie slightly trails Winslet …

Nielsen’s Pete Blackshaw has been following consumer buzz in blogs, Twitter tweets and more surrounding the peanut butter Salmonella scare. In this video, he offers practical defensive branding tips and tactical advice.

Related Post:
Consumers Spread Word Of Peanut Butter Recall Online

Microsoft’s Xbox is the most buzzed about game console so far this holiday season, Nielsen Online reported Thursday.
The Xbox 360 garnered the largest share of online buzz between November 1 and December 9, with 41.6% of blog messages mentioning Xbox, Wii or Playstation.
In comparison, Nintendo’s Wii was mentioned in 29.8% of game console blog messages, while Sony’s Playstation ranked third with mentions in 28.6% of gaming-related blog posts.

Nina Stratt
There are two types of word-of-mouth occurring online: conversation resulting from natural interactions between consumers regarding a brand experience, and conversation resulting from a specific campaign or event that encourages it. WOMMA classifies these two types of conversations as Organic versus Amplified word-of-mouth.
As a long-term strategy for building brand buzz it is important to focus efforts on organic word-of-mouth. According to a Nielsen Online survey, the majority of consumers state that they post information online because they use the product and either like it or don’t. In general, organic …