Social media monitoring of Lego - the toy brand NOT the slang

So the topic of this week is “Social media monitoring”. In order to learn more about this concept I have picked one of my all-time favourite brands: Lego - which I am sure some of you as a child have had the pleasure of spreading all over the living room floor, building amazing constructions, getting lost in a fantasy world of pirates, knights, firemen and Indians…  well at least until one of you parents stepped on a brick and told you to clean it up - or maybe that’s just how I recall some good Lego times :-)

The Lego Group

For a few insights of the Lego Group I can reveal that Lego is a Danish founded and family owned company producing the best toy of the century. In fact Lego has most recently become the world’s most valuable toy brand overtaken the leading position of mayor toy manufacturers such as Mattel (producing Barbie), Haasbro and Playmobile.

Besides Lego being an awesome toy, the reason that I picked Lego is, however, also related to the fact that Lego worldwide has millions of both adult and younger fans that share their passion for the small coloured bricks through all sorts of social media such as blogs, wikis, YouTube,  flicker, Facebook and Twitter not to mention all the individual fan sites. 

In order for Lego to nurture the many fans Lego has also set up the rebrick fan site, not to brand their products, but to establish a common platform for fans to interact, share ideas, rate and comment on what’s going on in the “Lego community”

Social media monitoring of Lego  

So with all this social media activity around Lego why not have a look at how Lego performs using different social media monitoring tools:

HowSociable: offers a simple tool to measure the Magnitude score on a scale from 0 – 10 (which is the activity of your brand on different major social media platforms) on a given week . I thought it would be fun to compare the results of Lego with their largest competitor Mattel 

Tweetreach: is another monitoring tool that specifically analyse the activity on Twitter providing gaphs, circular diagrams etc. and provides a list of the newest tweets containing the brand name.

Topsy: takes it a bit further by also monitoring links, photos and videos.

Reflections of findings

As I typed in Lego on Tweetreach and went over the latest tweets I however discovered a bit of a bias of the numbers: As some of the tweets were in foreign languages I found (thanks to my good friend Google translate) that lego is actually a “word” in Spanish with several different meanings i.e. “I bequeath” or “layman”. Also I found that “lego”is slang for “let’s go”.

Furthermore when I used Topsy I also discovered that one of the latest posted videos was a rap music video with by a band called Smile and their newest hit: LEGO. You don’t have to watch more than 30 seconds to tell that this is again the famous slang and has nothing to do with coloured plastic brick toys.

Returning to my analysis I furthermore discovered that some tools were case sensitive which I guess can be problematic do to the fact that users might write either: Lego, lego or LEGO again biasing a valid result. These findings unfortunately also decrease the validity of my mini battle of Lego vs. Mattel on HowSociable.

Conclusion

Ultimately the results of my analysis proved not to be purely build on the Lego brand. I do, however, think that the monitoring tools can provide some indication of the activity around a specific brand. The uniqueness of the brand name is, nevertheless, also very crucial in terms of gaining valid results. If Lego were to get the most accurate measures of the social media activity I would recommend the company to engage in social media intelligence instead of monitoring - as I found this to be the next wave of social media listening.

References

Lego

the besttoy of the century

the world’s most valuable toy brand

blogs
wikis
YouTube
flicker
Facebook
Twitter
rebrick
HowSociable
Tweetreach
Topsy
“lego”is slang for “let’s go”
Smile and their newest hit: LEGO
next wave ofsocial media listening