Lutz Finger and his team from Fisheye Analytics have just published an interesting social media monitoring report on the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. They looked at the coverage each athlete received in online news and social media combined, then calculated a “marketing value” for each one. For example, Lindsey Vonn of the US is the most valuable brand online, generating nearly $65 million of online coverage during Vancouver 2010.

To do this Fisheye haven’t just focused on “mentions”. As Lutz says, “Unlike traditional Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE), Fisheye has included a number of new factors such as sentiment, editorial credibility of the source, overlap of media audiences and repeated mentions in a single source on the same day.” That sounds like quite a thorough approach, and having met Lutz at Monitoring Social Media 09, back in Nov. I know he’s serious about his analytics.

There have been other social media reviews on the Winter Olympics, but (as far as I’m aware) none have tried to calculate the market value of the athletes. In our celebrity-driven culture, this information is probably far more valuable to the athletes’ agents than anything they’ve produced on the ski slopes.