Study: Facebook's tarnished brand has bounced back

YouGov's BrandIndex rankings for June(Credit: YouGov)

Polling firm YouGov, which said in May that Facebook had experienced a notable drop in consumer confidence right around the time of all that negative press about its changing privacy policies, now says that public attitude toward Facebook has taken a turn for the positive. In fact, the social network is YouGov's top "improving brand" for its BrandIndex numbers in the month of June among U.S. adults age 18 and over.Facebook climbed from a YouGov rating of 2 in the weeks of June 1-15, to 17.5 in June 16-30. To put things into perspective, YouGov's ratings span from -100 (completely negative) to 100 (completely positive). Is it going to be 100 percent accurate? No. But it does fall into line with what's been pretty evident on an anecdotal level--that Facebook has weathered yet another momentary PR fiasco.

In April, Facebook held the third edition of its F8 developer conference, and in turn unveiled its Open Graph API--which dramatically expanded the number of ways in which Facebook member profiles can interact with third-party partner sites. Privacy advocates freaked out, some prominent figures in the tech industry announced that they were deleting their profiles altogether, and negative headlines about Facebook dominated the tech press for some time. But the majority of Facebook's nearly 500 million members simply didn't seem to care, and Facebook does not appear to have suffered any loss of traffic or membership.It's worth noting that in second place is Toyota, which is also in image repair mode as it recovers from an embarrassing series of car recalls. And in 10th place is Mike's Hard Lemonade, a brand of malt liquor beverage that has historically been thought of as a "girly drink" but which has put forth a male-centric "Lemonade for Grown-Ups" marketing campaign of late.Ice that, bro.
Source: CNET News (http://cnet.com/)