OPEN

No, it’s not a dreary Channel 4 C&C show fronted by Jimmy Carr tonight, it’s the brilliant Futurelab’s remix of the Interbrand list of the world’s top 100 global brands, The Futurelab 100…

 They scored the Interbrand listees in the following way:

In December 2006, for each brand a manual calculation has been done of

– the number times a brand is mentioned in Google

– the number of times a brand is mentioned in Baidu

– the number of Technorati blogposts about the brand

– the number of links to the brand’s dot-com (.com) website (URL Trends)

– the google pagerank for the brand’s dot-com (.com) website

– the relative reach of the brand’s website (as per Alexa ranking)

– the number of times the wording “I love (brand)” and “(brand) is great” appeared in Google

– the number of times the wording “I hate (brand)” and “(brand) sucks” appeared in Google (in spite of its crudeness, this word has substantial statistical significance within a US context).

For each of these elements a ranking has been compiled. The combination of these individual rankings has then resulted in the overall position in the overall Futurelab 100 chart. They are compared to the performance of the brand in last years Futurelab 100 which was compiled based on the same sources.

It’s a great way of looking at brands online.

What would be interesting would be some analysis as to why there are such big differences between the lists.

Rating a brand’s online and offline value are hard to do, but it is clear that technology brands enjoy an advantage in the FutureLab list (the top 10, bar Disney, are technology brands).

Will we see a convergence between online brand value and offline? I believe so, as the “Google as reputation management system” line of thought would suggest.

Despite having websites and big online ad spends, many brands are effectively dormant or dullardly when one looks at their presence online. They lay out a stall and mumble message mantras at passers-by who have far too much else to do elsewhere on the web to pay much attention.

When they wake up a little more and start to play a proper role online, and as more and more of their communities and customers set up home on the web, we’ll see an Interbrand list looking more like the Futurelab one than it does now. Or even – as Google gets smarter and more accurate a scoreboard for reputation and brand – just more like the search results for “top global brands”.

Here’s the top 25 by way of a taster. Click on the image to see the PDF: