Meghan CallahanAnheuser-Busch Social Media Monitoring ReportFebruary 9, 2010Professor NixonPRCA 3030

Purpose

Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. is the largest brewingcompany in America. Anheuser-Busch operates 12 large breweriesin the United States and nearly 20 internationally. The companystarted in St. Louis in 1860 and has grown to selling nearly 11billion bottles of beer a year.In 2008, InBev, a Brazilian-Belgium brewing companyacquired Anheuser-Busch for almost $52 billion in total equity.Now, the makers of

Budweiser

and

Michelob

are joined with theproducers of

Stella Artois, Hoegaarden, Becks,

and

Bass

.Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. is now Anheuser-Busch Inbev.Anheuser-Busch most popular beers include

Budweiser

Michelob

Busch

Bud Light

, and

Natural Light

. Currently, thenumber one ranked beer in America is

Bud Light

. In 2007, thecompany introduced a 12% abv malt liquor called

Spykes

.In addition to the incredible popularity of Anheuser-Busch’s products, their advertisements are some of the mostpopular in the world. Commercial spots like the Super Bowl arebasically a no-brainer for Anheuser-Busch. Some of their popularads include the Clydesdales, Dalmatians, the “gimme light”spots, Frogs, the “wassup” series, and the “here comes the king”jingle.It was very important to monitor the conversationsoccurring about Anheuser-Busch on various social media websitesbecause it is such a widely known company and transcends such avast market. This report was especially pertinent at this highlyvisible time for Anheuser-Busch, the super bowl. The amount ofdiscussion centered around this company was overwhelming. I amconfident that 100 more reports could be done on Anheuser-Buschall with different nuggets of social media information.

Methodology

The social media monitoring website company, Radian6, wasgracious enough to provide their services free of charge to myentire class. Radian6 allowed me to type in certain words andthen I prompted the company to e-mail me whenever those wordswere used on various social media sites. I chose the wordsAnheuser, Busch, Budweiser, and Bud Light. As I stated earlier,the influx of e-mails I received from Radian6 was colossal.There were roughly 40 e-mails a day.I began my free trial with Radian 6 January 30, 2010 andhave used information from the site up until today, February 9,2010. Professor Nixon cordially set up my relationship withRadian6 and directed me to the website.I determined the credibility of my sources through severaldifferent methods. First, I went to the website quantcast.com toget a statistical update of the traffic of the various sites. Ialso researched and found credentials on the authors of theblogs I cited if information was available. On twitter, Iviewed the number of people following the user to get an idea ofthe influence they had on that online community.

Results

•

Super Bowl-

Due to the timing of this report and thepopularity of Anheuser-Busch commercials, there was a highinflux of discussions related to the Super Bowl 2010. Sixof the 15 nuggets of information I collected discussed thesuper bowl ads produced by Anheuser-Busch this year. Fourof the comments were negative ones. There was an overallsense of disappointment from the Anheuser-Busch ads thisyear. Since

Budweiser

and

Bud Light

commercials havehistorically been known to take the cake for super bowlcommercials, Anheuser-Busch has got some high standards tolive up to, and many consumers, from my research, did notfeel those standards were upheld. Oddly, and unfortunatelyenough, the Anheuser-Busch ad that received the most praisewas the Bud Light commercial that did not air due to FCC