There are many ways to measure brand awareness. As in most analyses, you shouldn’t rely on any single metric to determine which brands have most mindshare. Having said that, the Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands ranking is interesting. It measures conversations and web chatter. According to the ranking, Twitter comes out on top. Google comes in second, and Facebook makes it into fifth place. One of Twitter’s major competitors, FriendFeed, doesn’t even make it into the top 50 by this particular measure (did Scoble back the wrong horse and Kawasaki the right one?). But this ranking didn’t just include “social networking” brands. Rather, it was a survey of how frequently any brand was mentioned in a collection of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts. Interestingly, such well known brands as Coke and McDonald’s fell outside the top 50. I imagine this is because these brands no longer have novelty value. They are ingrained in our culture. Really the only time we could be bothered blogging about these sorts of brands is when controversy strikes, or when someone makes a provocative movie like Super Size Me.

So what does this mean? It means that right now Twitter is hot. People are talking about it, and that’s the best that Biz Stone and company could hope for. The big question for Twitter is how to convert all the talk into more users, and ultimately revenue. If they do manage to do this, it would be nice to know how they did it!