As if by divine circumstance after Steph’s post about her experience window shopping on the MINI web site, a recent article highlighted MINI’s work to measure the connection between online buzz and actual sales of the diminutive but spunky car.

The marketing team at MINI worked with MotiveQuest to research and measure what people were saying online about the car and MINI brand, and through their analysis, created the the Online Promoter Score in order to “correlate the relationship between marketing and online brand advocacy to sales by measuring the net frequency of people recommending a brand online.” Truly a tall order.

MINI and MotiveQuest scoured more than 30 million online conversations to find 52,000 people who were talking about MINI. Listening to what online communities were saying about Mini helped shape how the car company works with bloggers, who are now treated as members of the press and are invited to be among the first to test drive new cars or even podcast from MINI events.

But at the end of the day, it all comes down to sales. And how does Trudy Hardy, manager of marketing at MINI connect the online buzz with moving MINIs off the lot?

“…while Ms. Hardy said the metric doesn’t “tie back directly” to sales, it correlates web traffic and online conversations to actual retail traffic. “So we definitely see some correlation between online activity and how that affects showroom traffic,” she said. “We look at the spikes that are going on in conversations and see if it measures against an increased amount of traffic to our site, which ultimately leads to an increased amount of leads we send to our dealers.”

MINI’s work to engage with and support their most passionate customers online continues to have a great impact on their bottom line.