Biggest Focus Group in the World?

As quick-serve brands explore various social media tools for their marketing efforts, one new website is hoping to centralize the brands’ online presence and provide an independent site for their fans.

MyBrandz, an online service that launched its beta version in March, is “a place where you can talk, share, and get information about any brand in the world,” says Shahar Vigdor, vice president of business development for MyBrandz.

The website, which Vigdor says has earned 200,000 users since its launch, creates fan pages for brands where users can connect with the brands’ Facebook and Twitter accounts and be in community with other lovers of the brand.

MyBrandz ranks the biggest fans of brands—the “Top Freaks”—and also creates a “MyBrandz Matrix” that ranks brands by user popularity and affinity.

“MyBrandz lets you see the leading 300 brands of the world, sorted by size and love or popularity,” Vigdor says. “Popularity means how many people love them at Twitter, how many people fan them on Facebook, etc. It’s based on MyBrandz’ proprietary brand rank.”

Vigdor compares what MyBrandz is doing to the brand industry with what YouTube did to the video industry, and calls the service a “revolution.”

For quick-service brands, Vigdor says MyBrandz is a helpful tool because it aggregates the social world to one place where brands can go to better engage with their fans.

“The Starbucks community exists on the entire Internet, if you just elegantly organize it,” he says, borrowing a quote from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

“We let the Starbucks brand connect with its users in the most efficient, direct, and social way, in a way that’s going to lead the brand together with the fans. … It’s kind of the biggest focus group of the world.”

By Sam Oches