Top 100 Social Brands

The technology behind this ranking is a patent-pending algorithm:

the frequency of usage, the size of the social media environment, and the magnitude of the conversation. The result is a single numeric score for each brand: the Vitrue Social Media Index (SMI).

The Vitrue SMI is a unit-less number and that can be compared with other Vitrue SMI scores to provide a simple, relative measure of conversations on the web.

Virtue follows 2000 brands online. Right now, they say, the most common uses are:

1. Tracking movement of a single brand over time
2. Comparing a brand with its competitors, either at an individual point in time or over a period of weeks or months

There aren’t any education institutions in the top 100. But just for a little experiment, I checked the world’s biggest education brand against a comparable brand [and—OK, I admit my bias] a personal favorite.

So, drum roll, please. As of today, Harvard’s SMI beats Princeton handily, with an SMI of 78.2 vs. 40.8. I don’t know how Vitrue accounts for scale (Harvard is a much larger institution than Princeton), so I don’t take this as anything more than an interesting number.