Social Media Battle – Rachel vs. Zenyatta

Back in November we looked at internet searches for Rachel and Zenyatta to see how the Internet horse of the year votes were being tallied in terms of popularity. Rachel won that fairly easily. We surmised at the time that Rachel seemed to be popular in east coast cities and Zenyatta in west coast ones.

For about a year now, more and more companies are scanning message boards, twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media avenues using software, or consulting firms. One easy way for us to do similar, with whatever we’d like (free! But not quite as accurate mind you), is to use socialmention.com. It is a simple search based tool which scans the web for such mentions. It also adds some interesting statistics on sentiment, passion and reach for brands or keywords.

So, let’s check it out for the two protagonists in the Apple Blossom, Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra.

The sentiment index is fairly good. For every one bad mention, there are three good ones for a 3:1 ratio. If your followers are passionate (represented by the passion number above) that means they are likely to tweet or post often positively about the item in question. Zenyatta’s followers are pretty passionate! If you look at some subsets, these stats seem to hold well for blogs, news and mentions.

How about Rachel?

Once again these Rachel fans kick some butt. With only 26 “bad” mentions to 212 good, the 8-1 ratio dwarfs Zenyatta. The passion index is less than her rivals’, but if all those Zenyatta fans had to counter all the Rachel ones, I would think it would explain that pretty well.