Twitter 'worm' to track Super Bowl brand buzz

A social media monitoring company has created a tool to monitor Twitter buzz around brands at this year's Super Bowl, featuring each company represented by worms wearing football helmets.

The Super Bowl is the premiere sporting event in the US calendar, attracting a massive television audience both domestically and around the world.

It is also the time when brands and companies unveil their flagship and expensively assembled new TV adverts for the frequent commercial breaks.

This has previously led to almost as much interest and excitement over the ads as the game, including active discussion on Twitter about which went down the best.

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Social media monitoring company Brandwatch has therefore created a new tool that will monitor the Twitter buzz around this year's advertisers in real time.

Using "rye animation", Brandwatch's data visualisation shows the level of online reaction to each Super Bowl XLVI sponsor, including Paramount, Pepsi and Chrysler, up to and during the big game this Sunday.

The system works similarly to recent 'news worms' for major events, such as the UK television prime ministerial debates ahead of the 2010 general election in Britain.

Each football playing worm represents a single sponsor, while the number of tweets made about them or their products over the last 28 days is displayed underneath.

Brandwatch said that the worm with the football represents the brand with the most social media buzz, although the system does not indicate how much is positive or negative.

The company hopes to asses whether the impact of television ad-spend can be instantly measured by online buzz on sites such as Twitter.

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