These Are Most-Loved - And Most-Hated - Brands Of The Year

AlonsoP / Flickr, CCWhich brands most improved their reputations in social media in 2012? And which companies made them worse?

We asked the Dachis Group, a social media measurement agency, to tell us which brands got the biggest increases in consumer love, and which lost the most ground.

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Dachis maintains a "Social Business Index," which monitors user sentiment on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Renren, and signals from wikis and blogs. That covers 10 billion social actions and 50 million+ social signals in real-time across 30,000 brands.

We weren't interested in the brands that are the most or least-loved overall. Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines will always be among consumers' top and bottom brands. Rather, we wanted to know which companies got the biggest increase in love — or hate — over the year.

So Dachis measured the amount of "very positive" social media activity from the first three months of 2012 for each brand, and then did the same calculation for the last three months. The result is a ranking of the five companies that gained the most love, and the five that lost the most love.