This is a companion article to “Groupon Really a Super Bowl Traffic Loser?”.
In a previous article, I took a look at the assertion that Groupon’s traffic lift from its Super Bowl ad was inconsequential.
Here I want to take a look at a different part of the Fast Company article on Groupon’s Super Bowl performance: Buzz.
The article shows a graph put out by Nielsen showing that Groupon had a very large amount of buzz relative to other digital brands that advertised during the Super Bowl. While I’m not a huge fan of sentiment (it’s still very much an inexact science), it seems clear that some concept of sentiment is missing from the FastCo article. If the majority of buzz is bad, then it wouldn’t be surprising to find that actual direct response to the ads was low.
More importantly, however, this reinforces how important it is to not live by buzz metrics alone. It’s easy for people to say something about your brand one way or another. What is more telling is what they actually choose to DO. Lots of talk (even very positive talk) doesn’t guarantee any impact on your brand. People may have had an interaction, fired of a tweet about it, and then totally forgot about it. Sure, there would appear to be more opportunity for people to do something, and certainly more opportunity for brand impressions on a person’s followers, but the relationship between buzz and actual response is not straightforward, and likely differs not just between brands, but between kinds of efforts inside a brand.
It’s best to measure not just what people say, but what you are trying to get from a campaign so that you can get a sense of what kinds of buzz actually move the needle on your business, and what kinds are just hot air. And, of course, if you can’t do that, we can do it for you 
