UW-Madison #1 in online brand presence in 2010 ... ahead of Chicago, Harvard, MIT and Columbia

Wisconsin was the top U.S. university in terms of online brand presence in 2010, according to the annual TrendTopper MediaBuzz university ranking released yesterday by Global Language Monitor. The University of Chicago, Harvard, MIT and Columbia rounded out the Top 5.

While other privates, including Stanford and Princeton, did not make the Top 10 this year, UW-Madison moved up from #6 in the 2009 rankings.

Some technical background from Global Language Monitor on the models and indices underlying the rankings:

"The list is compiled using a mathematical model to measure the 'brand equity' of colleges in terms of their global impact on the Internet and social media during the year.  It indexes standardized "data collected from the Internet, social media, and blogosphere as well as the top 75,000 print and electronic media.  The end result is a non-biased analytical tool that provides a gauge of relative values among various institutions, as well as measures of how that value changes over time."