Brandolympics 2016: Sina Weibo generated 95.84% of total countable buzz

Final medal tally: It takes a global event like the Olympics to really separate the big guns from the also-rans. For brands like Ice Dew, Bright Dairy, Yili, Coca-Cola, BMW, Nike and 361°, Sina Weibo has once again come out on top for being the most useful social platform for marketers, partly because it allows 3rd-party tools to extract data. Take that, WeChat.

23 August medal standing: During London 2012, Nike stunned the market with its "find your greatness" campaign, which pioneered rapid-response marketing in China. Those were the days before WeChat, and social monitoring was not as robust as now. So Nike was using sheer willpower in a manual process to deliver the campaign. Fast-forward four years to Rio 2016, Nike’s competitors are ready to battle with Nike to gain social ground, but what Nike did was to introduce a full-on integrated campaign this time. There were ATL and BTL activities to work around this year’s "unlimited unleashed" campaign way before the Olympics started, evident from the dashes of hot pink and neon yellow (actually the main colours of their Olympic products) seen everywhere. On top of that, the brand's call-to-action this time was not just to trigger people to watch the games or to join conversations, but to unleash their own sporting power themselves. While their competitors are being more aggressive in social media this year, Nike has moved to higher ground, and yet in the meantime still sitting very pretty on top in terms of social buzz.

19 Aug 2016 medal standing: Today we are poking fun at a brand whose sponsorship didn't give it much leverage. The Chinese basketball team has not won any games since the start of the Rio, or even the Beijing, Olympics. TCL not only didn't gain from sponsoring the team, but also suffered from negative buzz surrounding the basketballers. Things got so bad that the brand announced a few days ago that it will be pulling out of the rest of its Olympic sponsorship.

16 Aug 2016 medal standing: Mengniu may have spent a fortune on sponsorship dollars on the whole Chinese swimming team, but Yili refused to be upstaged. The competing diary brand snatched the crown jewel of the team, Ning Zetao, who is by far the most popular of all the swimmers. Yili's smart move is reflected on how well it is received on social media via Ning's individual endorsement, not only by buzz volume but sentiment as well.

12 Aug 2016 medal standing: Ice Dew and Yili gained from an unexpected increase in buzz after athletes endorsed by them performed well. One, 20-year-old Chinese swimmer Xu Yuanhui, who won bronze in the women's 100-metre backstroke, charmed netizens with her funny answers online and in post-race interviews with state broadcaster CCTV.

When asked by the CCTV reporter if Fu had conserved her real strength for the later stages of the competition, she stated candidly that she had exhausted all her "洪荒之力 hong huang zhi li", a Chinese phrase which roughly translates to "a kind of mystical power that is mighty enough to manipulate the universe".

11 Aug 2016 medal standing: Whisper strategically combined its #KeepPlayingLikeAGirl content pillar with Chinese shooter Du Li's bronze medal; while Durex strengthened its association with the games with apt wordplay: "Good shot".