This Week's Social Media Power Rankings: Cisco Has a Warrior

Cisco rode its Twitter celebrity while THQ harnessed the power of fanboys (and girls) to rise in the social media rankings.

The social media sphere is an increasingly noisy place, especially for brands. But hiding somewhere in the static are strong signals from companies reaching their customers in innovative ways. The Social Business Index from the Dachis Group provides a (free) real-time ranking of more than 30,000 global brands based on their social performance. Every week we're taking a tally of who's getting heard, what they're saying, and why it matters.

It was a pretty quiet in the top 20 this week. There weren't any huge drops, or rises. To be honest, we were expecting the NFL to be rise a bit more, considering they're well into their season . Here's are this week's top movers:

Cisco's rise may be due to its chief technology officer, who might have one of the coolest names on the planet. Her name is Padmasree Warrior, and as the Dachis Group points out, she has some 1.4 million followers. Over the past couple of weeks, Warrior has been engaging her audience and tweeting things like her take on debates, the space sky diver and whatnot—a deviation from what she normally uses Twitter for (product launches, Cisco stuff). "Not every brand feels comfortable having executives tweeting on sensitive topics like this, but clearly Ms. Warrior is an opinionated and thoughtful social participant with a loyal Twitter audience," Kotlyar told us. "On the whole, executive engagement has become less of a fixation of brand marketers and PR professionals over the last few years, but clearly they remain powerful voices capable of creating significant brand affinity when they participate in social correctly," he added.

We're aware that there might be some of you who might not be all too familiar with THQ. To those people we have three letters: WWE.  THQ is the video game company in charge of bringing the WWE's video game to consoles all around the world. "In this case WWE13 an ‘attitude era’ themed video game, got the wrestling and gaming partisans talking in social." Kotlyar told us. Just for reference, WW13's Facebook page has close to two million fans.  But that's not THQ's only game in its stable. "Darksiders (THQ’s post-apocalypse adventure game) is promoting the release of a free patch with an extensive library of virtual items aimed at their diehard audience. As expected, the diehard audience responded positively to the free, and very cool, new in-game toys." Kotlyar said. "Game makers will always have an advantage in their efforts to drive social engagement due to their highly visual products, regular release schedules, and passionate fanbases," he explained.

Methodology: A project of the Dachis Group, a social business professional services group, the Social Business Index analyzes the conversations on social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others. The index, which currently covers approximately 25,0000 companies and 27,000 brands, detects behaviors and activities exhibited by these companies and analyzes their execution and effectiveness at driving outcomes such as brand awareness, brand love, mind share, and advocacy. The Atlantic Wire takes a snapshot of the rankings at the end of the day on Sundays.