This is the first in a series of four weekly reports Networked Insights is issuing on the 2010 World Cup and the social media buzz around its most popular players. The results have implications for the future of these athletes as brand endorsers. We’re using SocialSense, our social media listening platform, to track engagement and themes around the players.

Our latest research, “SocialSenseTV: Network Ratings Report, May 2010,” is complete, just in time for the upfronts season.”Lost” grabs the #1 spot in online engagement, though Nielsen ranks it at #10 in the traditional ratings.

By now, everyone agrees there’s great value to be drawn from the social-media dataset. But how do we define and categorize that value? PR and marketing activities are generally separated along reactive/proactive and tactical/strategic lines. Analytics is the key to a world of ROI from social-media data.

Marketing experts are telling Toyota that it needs to rebuild the trust of women in the wake of the recall mayhem. Social-media listening can play a critical role in campaign design, helping to fill in the gaps left by traditional methods.

The 2010 Winter Olympics have become a laboratory for how events and advertising play on the second screen. Most of the “experiments,” the way we interpret social media data, are focused on how consumers behave in social media. But what we can learn from 300 million people interacting online should inform all aspects of marketing.

Most of the effective algorithms for measuring sentiment rely on fairly well formatted, “predictable” text that follows formal grammar rules. But formal writing carries a bias. It is an immensely more difficult task to harvest information from the drips-and-drabs of informal writing such as is found in twitter and forums (or even blogs).