Correlation of Brand Mentions in Social Media and Web Searching Before and After Real Life Events: Phase Analysis of Social Media and Search Data for Super Bowl 2015 Commercials

The integration of social media technologies with second screen devices during the broadcasts of in-real-life events facilitates a mode of online conversation we refer to as the social soundtrack. In this research, we compute the correlations between the comments people post in the social soundtrack on various platforms (i.e., Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr) and the terms people search for on a major web search engine (i.e., Google). The broadcast media event for this research is Super Bowl 2015 commercials. Using statistical t-tests, we compare the correlations between the relative volume of searching, obtained via Google Trends, and the relative volume of social soundtrack postings on each of three social media platforms for two temporal phases (Pre and Post) for Super Bowl 2015. We exclude the game day from our research due to insufficiency of granularity for search data on the game day. Research results show that there is no overall significant difference in phase correlation between social media and search data. However, at the individual level, there are brands that do show significant correlation between phases. The number of significant positive correlations between the social soundtrack postings and web search concerning brands are considerably high compared to the number of significant negative correlations in both phases. The research results are important in identifying the temporal trends and interplay between type of social media platforms and searching concerning the sharing of brand mentions in word-of-mouth marketing. The result will eventually help retailers focusing on the brands with higher correlations to lever the opportunity of electronic word of mouth advertising.