As consumers tighten their belts these days, they may not be drinking less coffee but Starbucks is discovering they may not spending as much to get a caffeine fix.

To encourage more people to visit a Starbucks, the coffee chain recently unveiled a new advertising campaign. The campaign, happening at a time when McDonald’s is spending $100-million to promote its new line-up of McCafe coffee drinks, saw Starbucks use outdoor posters in six major U.S. cities – San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Washington, Boston and New York.

To bring social media into the mix, Starbucks ran a contest in which it is encouraged people to post photos of its posters on Twitter using the hashtag #top3percent.

For more insight into why Starbucks has launched the campaign, the company has put together a behind-the-scenes video featuring CEO Howard Schultz.

To get a sense of how well the news of the Starbucks’ campaign is resonating within the social media universe, we did a query using “Starbucks and Twitter”. What we discovered is the the campaign has been well-received.

In particular, social media participants in New York were very engaged with the campaign and extremely positive about it. This may have to due with the fact New York is a major advertising market so Starbucks attracted a lot of attention for unveiling a major campaign, particularly because Starbucks has now launched a campaign of a this magnitude recently.

So far, the tone of the conversations about the campaign is overwhelmingly favorable with 48% regarding it as positive, 43% as neutral and only 9% as negative.

As far as where the conversations are happening, 67.2% have taken place in the U.S. with the most activity in California (20%), New York (12.3%), Illinois (12.3%), Massachusetts (7.6), Pennsylvania (7.6%) and Texas (6.1%).

The Buzzgraph shows the most active keywords within all the conversations happening. The strongest links are between “coffee” and “tweet”, “coffee” and “facebook”, and “coffee” and BBDO”. Obviously, the contest being run on Twitter is attracting a lot of attention. As well, the talk about Facebook likely has to do with the fact Starbucks has 1.5 million fans on Facebook – and 185,000 followers on Twitter. BBDO, meanwhile, is the advertising agency that created the Starbucks’ campaign.

From a demographics perspective, the most conversations (60%) are being created by people who are 21-to-35-years-old, while 22.5% have been created by people under 20-years-old.

Males account for 60% of the participants, and females 40%

We also did a query looking at “Starbucks” and “Twitter” in the six cities where Starbucks has put up the advertising posters: Seattle (where Starbucks was started), New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Washington.

The most buzz is coming from New York (40.3%), Chicago (18.1%) and San Francisco (15.8%). New York and Chicago are most active advertising markets, which may account for some of the social media activity.

New York (on the far right) also ranked as the most positive about the Starbucks’ campaign with an impressive 99% positive or neutral sentiment.

Technorati Tags: coffee, MAP, social media, starbucks, sysomos

With American Idol 8 now down to the final four contestants, we thought it might be interested to take a look at how the popular television show has been doing within the social media universe.

As well, we drilled down to get some insight into how the final contestants – Adam Lambert, Kris Allen, Allison Iraheta and Danny Gokey – were being covered by bloggers.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of interest in the show, although it has dropped since the AI8 started in mid-January. (See the chart below to see the amount of social media activity.)

The decline may suggest the show hasn’t maintained its grip on the audience, or perhaps that some people are waiting until the show’s final episodes before tuning in.

What’s interesting is AI8’s global appeal. While 58.4% of the social media conversations happened in the U.S., there was a lot of activity in the U.K., Canada, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and South Africa. In the U.S., most of the activity happened in California, Texas, Washington State, Florida, New York and Illinois.

Overall, AI8 is the most popular with the 21-to-35-year-old demographic, with women accounting about two-thirds of all social media activity.

Of the 21-to-35-year-old demographic, 70% of the activity came from the U.S. – 12 points higher than the U.S. overall.

In terms of sentiment (or the tone of the social media conversations), 21-to-35-years-olds (Chart #1) were less positive than overall users (Chart #2). They were also more negative with 21% of the sentiment negative versus with 11% for overall users.

Chart #1

Chart #2

In terms of the contestants themselves, the flamboyant Adam Lambert continues to be the most talked about, attracting attention for his singing and risk-taking. Lambert has been on a roll since earning a standing ovation from hard-to-please judge Simon Cowell last month after doing a rendition of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World”.

In the chart below that shows activity for all four contestants, you can see how Lambert (the blue line) has consistently attracted the most attention from bloggers – with the spike being his Tears for Fears performance.

Lambert (#1) is particularly popular with social media participants under 20-years-old (36%), while Danny Gokey (#4) ranks highest among 25-to-35-year-olds and 35-to-50-year-olds.

And in terms of sentiment, Lambert (the second group of bars from the left) has received the most positive coverage (73%), while Danny Gokey is just behind at 69%. Allison Iraheta comes in at 62%, and Kris Allen 60%.

Technorati Tags: adam lambert, american idol, simon cowell, social analytics, sysomos