So, Facebook has an application called Lexicon, about which everyone seems to be tweeting today. It measures the use of words and terms in Wall posts over a period of time. For example, “happy birthday” shows up in Wall posts pretty consistently:
Whereas “christmas” and “the flu” each show a type of fluctuation. Makes sense:
Ok, so apply it to brands, and it kind of seems like a not-overly-accurate barometer for WOM (word-of-mouth):
Here’s a Budweiser spike right around Super Bowl time.
And the holiday season showed more mentions of Coca Cola.
And “Kobe” is seeing a spike right now, actually, presumably due to that stupid ‘viral’ video. The previous spike was around the time of some apparently blog-worthy hissy-fit-throwing over trades and contracts back in late October.
So, you can measure when Facebook users are talking about you. Kind of. You can also measure when they’re talking about your product or category (i.e., when your ad dollars would be best spent).
Observe the spike in mentions of “fishnets” leading up to Halloween.
I think we get the picture.
But is it really, truly useful? Probably not. It’s a nice curiosity for people like me, though.
